Writing is an impossibly complex activity. Writing, revising, marketing, and the many other activities involved are impossible for one person to master. While trying to make progress through such uncertainty, many authors adopt mistaken views of their fellow writers. Some view other writers as customers, and try to sell them their writing. Worse, some writers view others as their competition and compete with them.
The chances of someone being in the audience of our writing is small. Stephen King has sold 400 million books. If we consider this his “readers” and the world population as 8 billion, this means any random person has a 5% chance of being his fan (don’t argue with me about this calculation, I admit it’s sloppy).
If there’s only a 1 in 20 chances of someone enjoying Stephen King, what are the odds a random person you’re pitching your book to will be your target reader?
Writers who do this, desperately try to sell their books to everyone they encounter, implicitly take the view that they’ve got to “shoot their shot”. The worst the other person can do is say no, and what have they lost?
What they’ve lost is the chance to engage with a colleague. I don’t get angry at writers who try to sell to me, but I also don’t talk to them about writing. Instead of exchanging best practices in the current industry, I try to stay polite as they hit me with their sales pitch. I know these conversations will just lead to an awkward hard sell, and I’m guarded around them in the future. They’re missing out by shutting the door on these conversations (in exchange to a tiny chance of a one-time sale).
Writers getting competitive are even worse than this. I’ve seen people post in writer forums, ask for information, then when someone asks them a question in turn, they’re evasive or disingenuous. This is the height of hypocrisies to my mind, to expect a community to honestly help you, which you then turn around and try to poison. I had a local writer who got her books in a local grocery story. I asked her how’d she done it, and she responded “As for stores, nothing with writing is easy, except the writing part. 
Enjoy your day!” Fair enough. Whatever gains she’s made, denying me this information, are pretty small.
The people doing this clearly worry that helping other writers will somehow hurt them. The odds that a reader will ever buy one particular writer’s book instead another’s is ludacris. Many writers are writing in totally different genres, with hardly any reader overlap. Books aren’t something that people consume a set number of, either. If they read a good book, they’re more likely to read more. Smart authors writing books that are similar to others’ realize that people who enjoy one of these books are more likely to read the others, and that books being released to that sub-genre is good for everyone.
Years ago, I was in Biochemistry as my undergraduate major and in first year biology I missed a class and asked another man who was also in pre-med for his notes. I was SHOCKED when he looked me in the eye and said, “I’d like to help you, but if I give you my notes, you’ll get a higher mark, which will raise the class average, and hurt me, so no.” It was astonishing that he looked at such a tiny change as hurting him, rather than future collaborations potentially helping him. I accepted his decision, got the notes elsewhere, and never tried to interact with him again. Neither of us got into med school (I changed majors, and he wasn’t accepted). Somewhat ironically, he posted a couple of years ago on Facebook looking for an organ transplant. He found a donor. That donor was accepting the chance of serious health consequences in order to help him. My classmate is lucky that other people don’t share his self-centered world view.
Jason Kehe wrote an article in Wired about Brandon Sanderson that was quite critical. The most interesting part of the ‘scandal’ (I probably consider it a tempest in a teapot, more than a scandal), was when Sanderson wrote a response on Reddit and said: “Jason wrote what he felt he needed–and as a writer, he is my colleague. Please show him respect. He should not be attacked for sharing his feelings.”
Whatever other flaws Sanderson may or may not have, this is the right perspective. Other writers are our colleagues. That’s how they should be treated.
You are 100% right, yet so many don’t see it that way. Best part is our target audience (people who read) is growing all the time, why think of it as competition? If I like a book and read it, my next book I read is not competition for the first book. All I want to learn as a writer is how to tell a great story. Writing is a marathon as a colleague told me last night.
Absolutely!