Real life owner-managed businesses can be a delight to deal with or a nightmare depending on the person but they are usually somewhat quirky one way or another. If it is a start-up business especially, the owner is usually an entrepreneur in body and soul and has opinions, usually quite a few of them.
Most websites are flat, cold and unresponsive. OK, they may have fun and wacky graphics but you get replied to on a cost-cutting “you can expect a response from our call centre within 48 hours” basis.
Most community sites I visit have no visible management whatsoever. Others, like FaceBook, say very little until you contravene some obscure rule at which time it is like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have turned up to burn your house to the ground without a by-your-leave.
I used to contribute to one writers’ site where the owner kept sending us e-mails saying “I own this site, I want it to be a family site, but my ruling is ….” I left rather rapidly.
So this is a sort of love letter to Bob Grant who owns this site (following on from Minnette’s yesterday).
Bob goes around personally recruiting people and I think that makes a big difference. He has collected some very interesting people and, as I have said before, I have read some of the best books of my life written by the contributors to this site, and I am sure that I will get to read many more.
He also has a habit of soliciting opinions on the site on a regular basis which is unusual but unusually good business practice.
He has a visceral distrust of censorship which is extraordinarily robust. We haven’t tested him to the fullest extent yet, but he stretches far as the ‘sex’ debate indicated.
He actually publishes excellent articles of his own, combining words and pictures in a way that is way ahead of most of us in recognising trends in writing.
And then he insists on sending us pictures of his grand-daughter, and now daughter, on a regular basis. Maybe Randolph Hearst and Lord Northcliffe used to do the same but I was rather surprised at first, however the responses to this eccentric practice from the other contributors were all coo-coo, so it certainly builds the cameraderie of the site and, being British, eccentricity appeals to me.
I have not conversed with all the contributors to this site, but I have had e-mail exchanges with a good ten or so and they are really friendly and supportive privately (to the same extent as they can be waspish publicly).
I agree with Minnette that Speak Without Interruption is like a café you can drop into when you like, coffee by your side, do some reflective reading, lay down on the table whatever you are doing or whatever is on your mind, and then you can mouth off at a couple of the other people either for the pleasure they have just given you or for the rank error of their ways.
You can even go off on holiday for a couple of weeks and drop back in again and everything is still rolling on. It’s an evolving international café society for literary boulevardiers.
Cheers!
Wonderfully put, my friend.
I could not agree more – Bob is what makes the site what it is. He stays personally involved – answers emails immediately and is always trying to improve it for all of us. I very much appreciate the fact that he invited me to be part of this community.
O I So agree with you Tim about Bob; he has been nothing but a huge support to this writer and in fact has gone out of his way for me. This site gives me an opportunity to be expansive and a blowhard; I am a teacher at heart and have taught writing for over thirty years in all its permutations and here I can go off on writing, the subject I love above all others.
Rob