October 14, 2026
Reader × Author Experience
Award-winning Author
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Books are experiences between readers and authors. I'm inviting my readers to participate in that experience with me intentionally.
I've spent the last month or so looking hard at the reader experience from every possible angle, including my own as both reader and author. I started asking myself some simple questions. What is the reader experience really? I had studied this in college and lived it all my life. It's a fascinating thing that happens between a reader and a written work that’s completely unique to every reader. I've seen it countless times. You could put two people in a room about a single piece and they could argue themselves silly until they have no energy left.
I've also been surprised by the way readers connect to my work sometimes. My first children's book had comparisons to Star Wars for some of the characters. I remember being absolutely honored but also astonished because I didn't see it myself until they made me aware of it. And they were right, there were some parallels. I'd set out to write a simple story for my daughter and somehow every influence of my life was visible within it in a million ways I never consciously recognized. Then I watched, over the next decade plus as readers encountered the work and had their own experiences. That was an honor I never even anticipated.
What I've realized as a result of this new intense reflection on the process multiplied by sixteen years is something I consider to be relatively profound. I'm calling it the Reader x Author Experience (read as Reader by Author Experience). I’m designing my website and subsequent releases around the concept. Because what I've realized is somehow we've turned books into transactions. That’s not all they are. Yes, authors deserve to be compensated for their work, without question. But there’s so much more to it than that.
Books are experiences between readers and authors. So I am inviting my readers to participate in it with me intentionally. Because what I've learned is that the truest joy of writing really lives in the intersection between the reader, the author, the work, and the experience. I created the image for this post to represent that whole idea (Disclosure: this image was made with the help of AI of course, y'all know I can't even draw a smiley face straight. Make no mistake - AI did the visuals but the concept is all my own. I directed every part of this).
The publishing industry, in a rush to monetize something priceless, has displaced the wonder that can be inherent in it. It’s that special moment when a reader experiences a book that touches them deeply. Or when you finish a story and it has impacted you in a way you can feel but maybe can't quite find words for right away. This experience is designed to help you experience those magical moments and deepen them through more experiences with the work. Because as the author, I can share things of value to readers. How I wrote a work or what inspired it, why it mattered. What it taught me or is still teaching me. Through interactions we can learn from each other and have more experiences around the work itself.
One of the things that I've historically failed to do is create more opportunities for fans of my work. I was, in hindsight, simply following publishing conventions. I was mistakenly providing what I thought people wanted. But now I realize that what I should have been doing all along is providing a reader experience I would enjoy. Because I'm the first reader of my own work.
Sometimes being the first reader means I'm experiencing it while creating it. Sometimes I'm discovering it again through the revision process. I will experience it again when it's released. And then I'm continually experiencing it throughout its journey with other readers. It's a never-ending part of the process. Reader and author aren't separate, they're linked.
I have a perfect example of this too. When I tried a few years ago to record an audio version of Jason, Lizzy, and the Snowman Village, I came upon a specific passage with Morty the Snowman. As far as I know, this little easter egg still exists in the current version: Morty had a watch. And I burst out laughing in the middle of recording so much we had to stop. Derailed me entirely for the day. I couldn't believe he had a watch. I didn't even remember giving him one. Not always is inspiration in the best or most logical interest of a story, let me tell you! Now though, I’m not even sure I would remove it. Because who knows what someone else experiences when they read it? To me it was hilarious and incongruous but another reader might not even hesitate (after all, the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland had a pocket watch and was always running late to something).
Another example was reading aloud one of the scenes I'd written and hearing the musicality of it again years later. I remember being almost in awe of it in a way I couldn't appreciate when I wrote it the first time, but that I could experience anew. There was such delight and pride in knowing I'd written the words, created exactly the effect I intended, and had the joy of experiencing it firsthand. It's one of the biggest reasons why I still believe in reading stories aloud to audiences. I have learned firsthand that there's something magical in storytelling that as an author only I can bring to it. I almost have a responsibility to steward the work with it.
And I think that’s because creating something brand new from within yourself makes it unique to you and you alone. Someone else might have come up with a Christmas story but they've never put one together in exactly the unique way I have. That's part of what allows there to be thousands of stories about Christmas and all the other topics. Because every creator is unique which allows the work itself to be unique as a result. And then the reader's experience makes it unique yet again.
When you combine all those elements together, you have the Reader x Author experience. The intersection between them is this magical place of wonder that we've all tried to explain and never could quite find the words for fully. But maybe this helps us all get a little closer to understanding it.
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