I recently received an email requesting an interview with another blogger. When I visited the blog of the emailer, I was pretty disappointed. Sporadic 
posts, sparse graphics, and not a lot of visitors. However, I don’t have the luxury of waiting for Oprah to call. So I agreed to the interview.
I was not prepared for the ensuing questions. They were unintelligible, poorly written, and even worse, uninformed. After considerable angst, I emailed this return letter:
I’ve been dreading this email. But I must tell you, your questions are really unprofessional. Not only are there misspellings throughout — a minor issue, I know — but you ask questions that make me wonder whether you’ve actually read my website. You asked, “Would you honestly call your conversion a ‘bittersweet experience’? If so, why?” I never called my conversion a “bittersweet experience.” You might want to go back and re-read my “About” page. Also you asked, “Do you plan to write any novels someday?” Really? My website has announced my upcoming novel since May of [2010]. I have a large link to it in the sidebar for the Pre-sale. I post about related issues regularly.
Listen, I want to do interviews. But I would really encourage you to do your homework, ask some better questions, and present a more professional face. Sorry. I’m willing to reset this interview. But as it is, I think I’ll pass.
Call me a snoot if you want, but it almost seemed like I was being taken advantage of. Did this person spend any time on my website to see what I was about? Were they really interested in me? And did they ever think about activating their spell-checker? Anyway, I received no return email. And about two weeks after I mailed that response, I received notice that that website was closing down.
I can’t say I’m surprised.
I think I speak for a lot of authors when I say this: We like to do interviews! We like talking about ourselves, our stories, writing, and the creative enterprise. Furthermore, we need to network, want to see other writers succeed, and don’t mind lending (perceived) cred to artists climbing the ladder.
But if you’re going to request an interview with a “professional,” please do the following:
- Do your homework — Familiarize yourself with the person you will be interviewing, their books, bio, websites, personal history, brand, etc.
- Ask interesting questions — Frankly, many interview sites ask the same old questions. Why not spend time crafting something creative based off of your “homework”?
- Respect your interviewee’s time — They don’t have to do this, you know. And to the level they are successful, they are also probably more busy than you can imagine.
- Sound conversational — Many interviews, frankly, sound like a checklist. “How’d you get started?” Check. “What’s your favorite color?” Check. Perhaps some follow-up questions, curve balls, or slang to help us readers feel like we’re watching a conversation, not an autopsy.
- Check your motivation — Are you just promoting yourself and your blog, or the person you’re interviewing?
The democratization of the web is double-edged. On one hand, us amateurs finally get to have our say. On the other hand, a lot of us sound… amateurish. Amateur interviews are fine. Amateurish ones, not so much.
Ugh.
That’s all I have to say.
You are right about the same old questions. “How did you get your start?” “What is your favorite ____?” Some of those questions are necessary. Some are just lazy. Knowing what makes your subject unique is important to a good interview.
And speaking from a reader’s perspective, interviews are BORING, even professional ones. I avoid them like the plague. I’d rather read bios, or better yet, the books themselves. Bios are great because I don’t have to sift through a lot of boring questions to get the answers.
I will partly agree you, Jill. SOME interviews ARE boring. But I’d contend some of the boring-ness is the result of what I’m talking about here. It doesn’t help that there’s so many bloggers vying for attention either. On the other hand, an interesting person being asked interesting, thoughtful questions, can make for a compelling read.
I will confess to sometimes agreeing to do an interview..not for myself but for the author, but I don’t have time to read the book first. I find this situation uncomfortable, but I am flooded with requests. I usually only ask for interviews if I have questions or find the author really interesting.
I like to read good interviews, though, and am always happy to find them.
Agreed.
Jill, I also agree with Mike about the questions leading to boring interviews. I don’t blame you if you don’t like reading interviews–entirely your preference. It’s just that with good questions an author gets a chance to express themselves more “intimately” or more fully and it can make for good material and meaningful insights into their work.
I don’t think that your response was rude. His questions were something out of a Nigerian con-artist’s email.
I agree that you should do your best to study what is already available information on your interviewee so that you aren’t just asking questions readily available or common knowledge.
I really enjoy author interviews, even when they ask common questions. Everyone has their own story of finding passion in writing and how they’ve saw it through to production. I’d say success, but I don’t mind hearing stories of “failure” because we can learn from those also.
The point of interviewing an author should be to give them facetime to promote their work because you desire for them to be successful. You should also choose authors you would recommend to your listeners, which goes back to your comment on the importance of research.
You should also proofread your comments on other people’s blogs because you can’t go back and edit them (see “they’ve saw” – sorry).
I hate doing interviews because I believe I’m the worst at coming up with interesting questions. I’ve done maybe five or six interviews in seven years or something like that. That said, I’ve had some subjects that are much easier to interact with than others. The dialogue goes both ways.
I agree that some bloggers—many bloggers—are just plain lazy and not worth wasting time on. I’d like to throw out this for consideration, though: I don’t blog very often anymore. I figure with all the ways we can follow blogs now, it is not necessary to blog five times a week or even once a week. Now I blog when I have something to say. And that’s not very often, thank God (what we don’t need is more noise on the Internet). Way back when I started blogging I used to scour the internet for interesting stuff so I could add my twist and pass it on. It was time consuming and it wasn’t all that useful. People who knew how to Google could get their own information and my twist wasn’t all that important.
I think that a lack of comments is an indicator that a blog is not vibrant but a lack of posts doesn’t matter so much to me anymore.
What do you think? With people connecting on facebook now, is it safe to blog sporadically?
Not everybody can conduct an interesting, engaging interview. K.M. Weiland asked me questions that not only challenged me but showed she had boned up on what I’m about, and I found her questions to me very interesting. Her questions were fashioned to me and were a delight to answer. I’ve only conducted two interviews myself and both times tried to channel the things I thought were effective in my interview with Katie.
Recently I was looking at a media kit for a very prominent author and speaker. Right in their kit was a list of well crafted interview questions. I am a reporter and not sure if I felt offended by being guided or if I thought perhaps the “speaker” couldn’t think on her feet. I was wondering if all the questions you COULD ask were limited to just those. I then thought that perhaps they were there to help out a novice to guide a radio interview or something. Sometimes I stump the people I am interviewing but most often, they say…”wow that was a qood question” it would seem when people “have to think” before they speak..they LIKE it…they like to think and those thoughtful interviews are the ones I most like to read!