John Scalzi on literary bloggers who sling mud:
Authors, if you must write a piece in which you assassinate the character of some other writer, don’t take money for it. That’s just icky; there’s something unspeakably unseemly about Almond having taken money for suggesting that some other writer might spooge in his pants just through the act of meeting him. It certainly doesn’t make you want to handle any change that Almond might give you.
Really, now: do it on your blog. Unmediated, ill-advised gouts of ego-salving literary otherhating are what blogs are for. And then you get the fun of actually conducting a writer’s feud in your comment thread, because the chances of the other writer not finding out you’ve written horrible things about them (via their daily egosurf through Google and Technorati) are slim approaching none. You get all of the dubious thrill of slapping down some other wordsmith, with none of the reputational taint of taking filthy lucre for what is essentially an exercise in degrading yourself.
Mind you, you shouldn’t be initiating an online literary badmouthing in the first place. Other than cheap thrills, it doesn’t do anybody any good, and you develop a reputation for being something of a twit (responding to a literary badmouthing is fine, although remember the key to success is bemused indifference, at least in the initial response. Wait to bring out the knives until the inevitable comment thread to follow). Better than debasing yourself online is to save that sort of thing for bar talk, where it can eventually settle into the sediment of literary gossip. It’s more fun that way. In any event, I suspect it would lead to a higher chance of a physical altercation, which is what Almond seems to have been hoping for, anyway. Although, honestly, watching authors fistfight is like watching geese play Jeopardy. There’s a lot of honking and squawking but no one ever gets to what they’re supposed to be doing.