Enjoy your dirty money. You will never have anything else. You will never write another sentence above the level of In Cold Blood. As a writer you are finished.

—Letter to Truman Capote from William S. Burroughs

Trash talk between authors is something of a time-honored tradition. Whether it was Keats versus Byron, Salman Rushdie versus John le Carré, Ernest Hemingway versus everyone, or even the War of the Jennifers (Jennifer Weiner versus Jennifer Egan), author feuds have a long and distinguished history—often involving some element of snide snobbery primarily between (let’s be honest) established white authors and usually men. (Check out some of our favorites at “25 Legendary Literary Feuds, Ranked.”)

Like most salacious gossip, author feuds have provided a great deal of lip-smacking anticipation and enjoyment for the literary set. We dare you to read through some of those feuds and not enjoyably wince at the burns, roasts, and occasional outright hostility between authors. (Although spitting on Colson Whitehead is fair grounds for fighting.) It’s like tabloid fodder for book nerds.

That’s not to say that authors should always be nice to each other, such as when an author expresses damaging and hateful opinions on social media and other authors don’t approve or endorse those problematic comments. (Many authors—and much of the internet—turned against J. K. Rowling when she began expressing harmful transphobic messages on Twitter.) Sometimes an author needs to be called out. 

When we discuss feuds, we’re talking strictly about “your book/writing is terrible” versus “No, your book/writing is terrible.”

As much as it provides delicious entertainment value and, face it, great PR for the authors, there are times when a literary feud can be damaging to an author, especially a new or emerging one. And it’s worth noting that the greatest and bitterest rivalries usually occur between authors who have already earned a great deal of success and acclaim.

But what happens when these rivalries occur between lesser-known authors? And what happens when it occurs on Twitter, where the rest of the world can weigh in?

This is when problems can start.

Twitter, as we all know, is not the place where cooler heads prevail. More than any other social media platform, it is the destination of choice for every unfettered thought, random musing, and poorly disguised word vomit. Even with the restricted character count. Sometimes these thoughts are gems. Some are genius, or heartbreaking, or heartwarming. And some are filled with hate and cruelty. More often than not, arguments erupt over politics, policy, music, fave movies, whether peeing in front of your partner is a boundary that shouldn’t be crossed (correct), and most recently, over whether masks should be worn in public during a public-health crisis. 

But it’s all too easy for fights to break out within the writing community. We’re not addressing differences of opinion (oh hi, Oxford comma), but rather when two authors get heated, get personal, and quickly block each other before taking their beef to their respective followers for support. Sometimes these exchanges become bitter to the point of creating two warring factions, forcing fans to take sides on an issue that was, at its core, more about ego or miscommunication than about a serious subject that merited the ensuing flame war.

For a flame war it is.

It creates dissonance for fans and readers. After all, if you love this author, how can you love that author? Maybe a display of temper or a short fuse resulted in readers reexamining not only your behavior but whether they can continue to enjoy reading a book from you after you had a particularly jerkish day on social media. But what happens if things go too far? It’s not unusual for readers to take to reviews to trash another author as an act of retaliation. Even the authors themselves will stoop to this form of petty, and frankly harmful, vengeance. 

Think about it. Lose your temper and alienate someone because of some escalated personal argument, and suddenly their fans, friends, and readers could retaliate by giving your book one-star reviews. Not because your book is terrible, but because they’re angry with you. One bad and thoughtless exchange could affect not only your sales but your reputation, your following, and your livelihood. 

It’s not just on Twitter either. For instance, years ago, Goodreads was forced to remove reviews that were the result of a hostile exchange. 

“You could spend hours following the trail of a single dispute, through smoking battlefields of interlinked comments threads and screen shots and blogs where the message ‘this post has been deleted by its author’ stands like a tombstone over the grave of the one witness who can tell you what really happened,” writes Laura Miller in “Goodreads: Where Readers and Authors Battle It Out in an Online ‘Lord of the Flies.’” “What’s been going on at Goodreads and in Amazon discussion boards and on Twitter are more than just the usual Internet mishegoss, however. These are epochal convulsions, writ small. They’re the result of significant changes in the relationship between authors and their readers, and those changes have two causes: the boom in self-publishing and the rise of social networking.”

For an indie or self-published author, this kind of behavior can be damaging to your career. As Miller points out, indie authors don’t have someone managing their social media or advising them to walk away. 

Because the biggest mistake of all is not walking away, not making peace, and not apologizing—both to the other author and your fans and readers. You’ve essentially drawn them into a domestic argument, forced them to take sides, and shown them the very worst parts of yourself. Few people can lose their temper and not alienate witnesses. Others will flee simply to avoid the drama. “Oh, geez, I don’t need this crap in my feed” or “That’s really embarrassing.”

There are times to speak up and raise our voices as authors. But there are also times when “tweet first, think later” can backfire in ways we can’t even imagine. For some authors, this creates a complete and total avoidance of any confrontation. Others still speak out about the causes they believe in, knowing that sometimes having a voice means using it for good. After all, everything we write can be political. How we create characters, how they interact in the world we’ve created, it’s all touched by how we view the world. 

But there’s a time to stand up, and there’s a time to stand down. 

So, before you engage, ask yourself if you’re willing to deal with the consequences. 

After all, it’s one thing to be Truman Capote or Hemingway and write cutting little notes to your nemesis. But fame and fortune have their privileges. And the rest of us will have to wait until we’re secure in our publishing careers before we can cheerfully say, “To hell with a consequences…and my career” the next time someone acts out.

Hannah Guy lives in Toronto and is a professional writer and copywriter who specializes in books, books, and more books. Follow her on Twitter at @hannorg.