Book Roast

The other day I heard about this cool looking new site. It plans to be a cool interactive place to find out about new books and also have a chance to meet authors in-person-on-the-internet.

I doubly appreciate this, as a reader and as a (former, and possibly future) doer of internet book marketing. I think right now, at this exact moment, authors and publishers are starting to really embrace the web in a big way. Authors (and aspiring authors) are big bloggers, lots of publishers big and small are Facebooking, and so on.

There are TONS of opportunities out there to interact with authors online--way, way better than shyly sidling up at a reading to ask for a signature, which is honestly quite impersonal. On the internet, you can actually have a conversation. But in spite of that, I'm not sure if those opportunities are really being taken advantage of! Perhaps it's because when I wrote a publisher's blog it was a fairly new blog, and because it was aimed at children (not known for being big bloggers) but in my experience, there are lots of wasted opportunities out there. That means authors out there who would LOVE to be having great dialogues with their readers, who are in fact writing to their readers... and being greeted with a resounding silence. The readers aren't there!

But they should be. Go there, readers! Go to Book Roast and chat up an author. They tend to be interesting people to talk to, and in my experience, most of them don't bite.