One of the questions I seem to get a lot when I'm doing school visits is "who is your biggest competition?"

I think people are usually surprised by my answer: "bad books."

You see, I was a reluctant reader as a kid (a fact that I've heard a lot of other authors echo lately), and I spent a long time thinking I didn't like to read simply because the first books I tried to read were bad books.

So I never think of authors like Stephenie Meyer, E. Lockhart, Rick Riordan, Sarah Dessen, Meg Cabot, etc., as my competition because if readers love their books then those readers are going to go through life looking for MORE books and eventually they might read some of mine.

If readers--particularly reluctant readers--pick up a few BAD books then they're going to start thinking that they don't like to read--period. And that's not doing me any favors whatsoever.

-Ally

PS...I'm still a reluctant reader, by the way. I finish maybe a third of the books that I start--we're talking big, national best-selling books and award-winning books and books that everyone and their dogs just loves and I'm like "oh, yeah, I'm 30 pages from the end of that but I sat it down one night and never had the desire to pick it up again."

(By the way, I never actually SAY that, I just think it!)

I don't know what kind of example that's going to set the readers of the world, but I think it's a pretty good lesson for the writers of the world: never, ever, ever give a reader an excuse to walk away from your book--or readers like me will take it.