Blogs: An Author's Best Friend?
Posted on July 7, 2005
The New York Times explores the world of authors who blog while they are writing a book. John Battelle, the founder of Wired and The Industry Standard told the Times that he uses his blog as sounding board and uses reader feedback to help him work on his upcoming book, The Search: The Inside Story of How Google and Its Rivals Changed Everything.
Authors' blogs also change the solitary mission of writing into something more closely resembling open-source software. Mistakes are corrected before they are eternalized in printed pages, and readers can take satisfaction that they contributed to a book's creation. The blogs can also confer some authority: Aside from drawing on the collective intelligence of its readers, Mr. Battelle's site has become a compendium of Google- and search-related issues.But not every author thinks it's such a good idea to discuss one's work in progress on the Web. It's an interesting debate. Given the level of copyright infringement that is rampant on the Web, we think that sharing extensive details of your next novel in your blog might have some unfortunate consequences. But then again, maybe we're just paranoid.Authors who have experimented with blogging in this way - and there are still only a handful - say they hope to create a sense of community around their work and to keep fans informed when a new book is percolating. The novelist Aaron Hamburger used his blog to write about research techniques he employed to set his coming book in Berlin (www.aaronhamburger.com). Poppy Z. Brite, another novelist, has written about her characters on her blog as though they have a life of their own, not just the one springing from her imagination (www.livejournal.com/users/docbrite).