The Ottawa International Writer’s Festival has made quite a name for itself. Twice a year, the event highlights a spectrum of Canadian and international big-name authors and brings them to the nation’s capital for serious discussions on prose and poetry.
This Sunday, when the festival again gets underway, audiences will have a chance to court Canadian award-winning writers Charlotte Gray, David Adams Richards and John Ralston Saul.
While the forum offers the slim chance of a handshake between author and reader, the enticement of these meet-and-greets is partially dwarfed by a new trend on the literary scene – the advent of the interactive author.
Any reader who wants a glimpse into the lives of Gray, Richards and Ralston Saul can just type the authors’ names into Google. Immediately, the search engine pulls up the personal websites of each. Access to biographical information, book information, and contact information is instantaneous.
Domestic and international publishers across the board are working hard to connect author and readers by bandwidth – blogs, ‘question-and-answer’ interviews, podcasts and virtual tours with the author often accompany the release of a new book.
While a reader no longer has to leave his computer desk to learn about a writer’s quirks, the trend begs a whole new question.
How much is too much?
Take any English course in university or college and professors warn students of literature’s cardinal rule; never confuse an author with his or her creative work. The mix-up can deflate the meaning of a novel and can accuse the author of a lack of imagination.
But what happens when publishing companies use the Internet to purposely push the personalities of their authors, in an attempt to sell their work?
Smaller Canadian publishing houses, such as Fitzhenry & Whiteside, have taken their authors on virtual tours, essentially saving the cost of a plane ticket and a hotel room.
The company says last year’s tour with Deborah Ellis for her book Jakeman was a big draw.
Another Canadian publishing company, House of Anansi, broadcast a daily blog by author Michael Winter in the lead-up to his latest release, The Big Why.
International publishing houses also promote the personalities of their authors.
Penguin Books has adjunct promotions on many of the Internet’s most popular sites, such as Facebook, Second Life and MySpace – the sites are often used to promote authors themselves.
One of Penguin’s latest releases is Slam by author Nick Hornby, who is known for his popular fiction-to-film releases High Fidelity and About a Boy. Hornby has more than 2,000 friends on his MySpace page and a series of blogs revealing that he too, just like any average bloke from the U.K., is frightfully dedicated to watching and tracking his local football team.
But do readers really need to know that their favourite author is a sports fan? And what about those writers with a reputation for being reclusive?
Emily Bronte, author of Wuthering Heights, was infamously shy. J.D. Salinger, author of the great American novel Catcher in the Rye, got into a legal battle when someone wanted to publish a biography of him.
Shakespeare, in many of his sonnets, laments his shyness. During his life, he worked as an actor and playwright, but his reputation fell short of the fame he later gained in university ivory towers.
Imagine a world where these ‘timid’ authors are accused of bad publicity, so their work never gains any exposure.
Books should be judged according to their literary merit. Things like plot, character, use of metaphor, poetry of the language – these are the things that should be used to promote a good novel.
Let the character of a book stay in the book and let the character of an author stay private.
The Internet has a lot of benefits, but the shameless promotion of authors is not one of them.