Will Your Book Be My Friend?

More on promoting books on MySpace:

A primary reason authors join MySpace is to connect easily—and instantly—with their existing audience, as well as thousands of potential readers. Elsewhere on the Internet, many writers employ Web designers to help maintain personal sites, making it costly and time-consuming to keep them freshly updated, especially with last-minute news. Koren Zailckas, author of the memoir Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood, kept a MySpace blog while on her book tour, and says the "control freak" in her likes being able to notify her fans with the touch of a button when she's doing a reading or has a TV appearance. Zailckas says she feels closer to those she meets on MySpace, since she can check out their profiles just as they view hers. "It's more intimate," she says. "The readers you're communicating with are honest-to-god human beings with faces and (now and again) your book in their list of 'favorites.' Silly as it sounds, there's something tremendously moving about being able to 'see' one another, even if it is in a nerdy sort of way." Zailckas points out that while readers aren't necessarily visiting their favorite author's Web page religiously, they often log on to MySpace on a daily basis and will see bulletins posted there.