Communication Addiction

I don't think I could be any more antsy today if you took all the sugar and caffeine away from my diet. I guess you could say I'm an email addict, and I'm really missing having a reliable email server.

Barbour put in a new spam blockers and so forth a while ago, and for over a week we've noticed that some random emails don't reach the addressee, some bounce back with error messages, and some go through just fine. It is happening on both the sending from Barbour end and the receiving at Barbour end, mostly with AOL accounts but some other various ones too. So frustrating. I've been waiting for information that never came through while authors have been waiting for replies to emails I never got.

It makes me realize just how dependent we are on the whole emailing system. I do love email compared to the old slow snail mail, to the cumbersome fax, and to the interfering and time consuming phone. But becoming too dependent on or confident in one form of communication can lead to trouble too, I guess.

I don't know how an author manages in the publishing world these days without the Internet or email. I know of a couple folks who have been around forever who are so well established that their publisher can work around them not being hooked to the Web, but for the most part an author has to be able to function online.

I've occasionally met an author at a writers' conference who will tell me they don't have email access (a couple haven't even had a computer). Knowing that makes me 99.9% sure I'll have to reject their material. They may have great stories to tell, but the author has to be able to deliver them to the publisher and the reader. And nowadays so much about marketing an author and their work happens through enewsletters, blogs, Web sites, online stores, and so on that an author has to be able to get into the Internet and involved.

Okay, I'm probably preaching to the "choir," but I had to vent my email frustrations somehow.