Authors increasingly publishing online blogs

NEW YORK -- Jennifer Weiner, author of the best-selling novels "Good in Bed" and "In Her Shoes," likes to spend three to four hours a day working on fiction. When she's done, time and family permitting, she updates her online journal.\n"When I went on my first book tour (in 2001), I began keeping a Web diary, and every day I would write about the latest indignity I suffered," she says. "And I found I really enjoyed doing it. It's a way for me to keep in touch with my readers."\nBlogging has caught on with everyone from high school students to journalists, and Weiner, Neil Gaiman and Claire Cook are among a growing number of authors who no longer confine private thoughts to private papers. Instead, they post weekly or even daily dispatches on the Internet that range from tour diaries to family updates.\nAuthor blogs are also the latest reminder of how times have changed since writers simply wrote their books and let the publishers -- and the work itself -- speak for them. Now, many authors arrange their own tours, maintain Web sites, send e-mail newsletters and, in the case of Weiner and others, offer ongoing personal commentary.\n"There are 300 channels of cable, there's the Internet," Weiner says. "I think it was a wonderful time when you could be like J.D. Salinger and publish something and hole yourself up in New Hampshire. But we have to realize we sell a product in the marketplace and the marketplace has a lot of competition."\nAuthor blogs often have a light, conversational tone, much like postcards or telephone calls. Weiner might confide she's doing laundry, or report that her baby daughter can now flip over from back to stomach. Gaiman, author of the "Sandman" comic book series, interweaves reader comments with his own responses.\nOn Cook's blog, the author includes photos and commentary from a writer's conference she attended last summer, highlights from a recent tour and reviews of her latest novel, "Multiple Choice," about a mother and daughter going to college at the same time.\n"I don't want to give too much information. I'm not into full disclosure. But it's a still a great way to let readers feel like they're part of your life," says Cook, who has also written "Ready to Fall" and "Must Love Dogs."\nWriters who don't keep blogs often cite lack of interest or lack of time.\n"No," says author A.M. Homes, when asked if she would start a blog. "Without a doubt. No. I'm too busy writing to do a blog."\nEven those who have worked extensively with the Internet have resisted. Fiction writer Robert Olen Butler, who once composed a short story online in real time, says he can't bring himself to maintain an online journal.\n"I don't write nonfiction," says Butler, whose story collection, "A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain," won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. "I am so against writing nonfiction that it makes me physically ill. I admire people who do it, and I love to read it, but I don't even like to write long e-mails."\nPublishers, too, are divided. At Viking Penguin, which publishes Cook, executive editor Pamela Dorman says she encourages blogs "as a very targeted and effective way to increase word of mouth." However, she adds that it's too soon to know if blogs help sales. At Farrar, Straus & Giroux, where one prominent author, Shirley Hazzard, doesn't even own an answering machine, president Jonathan Galassi says he doesn't pay much attention to blogs.\n"Maybe we're behind the times," says Galassi, who publishes such award-winning authors as Hazzard, Susan Sontag and Jonathan Franzen. "I just think there are too many words out there already. I hope our writers will be spending their time writing their books, not their blogs."\n"In general, blogs don't make a lot of sense for literary fiction authors," Dorman says. "Their audience is more accustomed to seeking information through reviews and traditional media."\nM.J. Rose, a novelist whose books include "The Halo Effect" and "Lip Service," says she has mixed feelings about online journals. A leading advocate of writers using the Internet, she wonders how many new readers blogs attract and thinks a blog should reflect personal passion, not professional calculation.\n"A blog can't be a promotional tool first. It has to be rooted in a subject the author cares about, is interested in, and has something to say about," she wrote in her own blog, which started in August and focuses on the marketing of books.\n"This blog is about marketing, not because I don't have passion for my own fiction -- I do -- you can't write novels without it -- but I don't have a burning desire to describe my writing life. I live it -- I don't want to write about it"