In 2009, author Neil Gaiman, who was born in England but has lived in the US since 1992, wrote a blogpost titled Entitlement Issues. In it he discusses a letter he received from a fan of the author George R R Martin, who complained that it seemed like Martin wasn’t spending enough time working on his latest novel.
Gaiman comments on how readers tend to think that, once they spend money on one of the books in a series, the author no longer has the right to do anything other than write the next one.
At one point he writes “you’re complaining about George doing other things than writing the books you want to read as if your buying the first book in the series was a contract with him: that you would hand over your ten dollars, and George for his part would spend every waking hour until the series was done, writing the rest of the books for you.”
The English-American author also attempts to convince readers that authors are not obligated to fulfill their readers’ every wish, saying, “George R R Martin is not your bitch.”
