In 2008, as I recovered from my heart defect, I had very little time to spare on anything that wasn’t income-producing. As a result, unless someone was paying me to appear somewhere, I pretty much cut out all such free appearances. Unintentionally, as a result, I came to sympathize with this author right here:

“Over the past five years, every writer I know has been told by their agent to ‘monetise the activity around their writing’. Give talks. Go to conventions. Judge prizes. Write reviews. W...