Well, I guess I may actually add something to the conversation other than "non-furries being meanies!" (again). From Stephen King's "Introduction: Practicing the (Almost) Lost Art", the essay that opens his 2002 short story collection Everything's Eventual, on the publishing of his short story "Riding the Bullet":
After "Bullet" was published as an e-book (cover, Scribner colophon, and all), that changed. I was mobbed in the airport lounges. I was even mobbed in the Boston Amtrak lounge. I was buttonholed on the street. For a little while there, I was turning down the chance to appear on a giddy three talk-shows a day (I was holding out for Springer, but Jerry never called). I even got on the cover of Time, and The New York Times pontificated at some length over the perceived success of "Riding the Bullet" and the perceived failure of its cyber-successor, The Plant. Dear God, I was on the front page of The Wall Street Journal. I had inadvertently become a mogul.
And what was driving me crazy? What made it all seem so pointless? Why, that nobody cared about the story. Hell, nobody even asked about the story, and do you know what? It's a pretty good story, if I do say so myself. Simple but fun. Gets the job done. If it got you to turn off the TV, as far as I'm concerned, it (or any of the stories in the collection which follows) is a total success.
But in the wake of "Bullet," all the guys in ties wanted to know was, "How's it doing? How's it selling?" How to tell them I didn't give a flying fuck how it was doing in the marketplace, that what I cared about was how it was doing in the reader's heart? Was it succeeding there? Failing? Getting through to the nerve-endings? Causing that little frisson which is the spooky story's raison d'etre? I gradually realized that I was seeing another example of creative ebb, another step by another art on the road that may indeed end in extinction. There is something weirdly decadent about appearing on the cover of a major magazine simply because you used an alternate route into the marketplace. There is something weirder about realizing that all those readers might have been a lot more interested in the novelty of the electronic package than they were in what was inside the package. Do I want to know how many many of the readers who downloaded "Riding the Bullet" actually read "Riding the Bullet"? I do not. I think I might be extremely disappointed.
Well, I guess I may actually add something to the conversation other than "non-furries being meanies!" (again). From Stephen King's "Introduction: Practicing the (Almost) Lost Art", the essay that opens his 2002 short story collection Everything's Eventual, on the publishing of his short story "Riding the Bullet":