Amazon's author-blogs and the Age of the Conversational Artist

Amazon is hosting author-blogs alongside of the sell-pages for those authors' books. I think that this is an incredibly important development, one that recognizes that in the present day, an artist's ability to be conversationally engaged with her audience is a major potential source of career-success.

Here's what I think: back in the Vaudeville days, the thing that mattered most was your charisma. If you gave a great show, it didn't matter much how technically accomplished you were (contrariwise, if you were a virtuoso on your instrument but stood like a statue on stage, it really hurt your career). That was the age of the charismatic artist.

With radios and recordings, though, charisma wasn't enough. When your audience gets at your work through an hand-cranked Victrola or a big cabinet radio, your stage presence isn't really perceptible anymore. However, your technical skill with your instrument shines through in a way that it never had before. That was the age of the virtuoso artist.

Today there's the explosion of choice brought on by the Internet. All entertainments are approximately one click away. The search-cost of finding another artist whose music or books or movies are as interesting as yours is dropping through the floor, thanks to recommendation systems, search engines, and innumerable fan-recommendation sites like blogs and MySpaces. Your virtuosity is matched by someone else's, somewhere, and if you're to compete successfully with her, you need something more than charisma and virtuosity.

You need conversation. In practically every field of artistic endeavor, we see success stories grounded in artists who engage in some form of conversation with their audience. JMS kept Babylon 5 alive by hanging out on fan newsgroups. Neil Gaiman's blog is built almost entirely on conversing simultaneously with thousands of readers. All the indie bands who've found success on the Internet through their message-boards and mailing lists, all the independent documentarians like Jason Scott, comics authors like Warren Ellis with his LiveJournal, blog, mailing list, etc.

Conversation with an audience isn't easy, and there are lots of people who produce great art and lousy conversation. But that's not any different from previous technological changes: there were lots of charismatics who couldn't shift to radio. Lots of virtuosos will fail to shift to conversation.

Technology giveth and technology taketh away. There will always be some art that fails though it deserves to succeed and vice-versa. There will always be more artists than fans can support. The important question to ask is, does this open the field to more people, or fewer?

Conversation with an audience recruits fans to choose, through evangelism and advocacy, which art will succeed and which art will fail. It changes the system where the sole arbiters of such decisions work at publishing or entertainment concerns. It doesn't replace that system, of course, but it augments it. A TV executive's hand can be stayed from canceling Babylon 5 by the advocacy of JMS's fans, who have become his friends through conversation. A self-published novel like John Scalzi's can be buoyed up to the attention of a publisher through his readers' evangelism.

And it can also do an end-run around publisher-as-decision-maker, like Kelly Link and Jim Munroe's self-publishing successes.

So the Age of the Conversational Artist will harm the careers of some artists, but it will buoy up the careers of still more, by creating a broader range of decision-makers as to which art succeeds and which fails. And it's marvelous to see Amazon acknowledging this and jumping in to help.

Amazon is one of the many players in the publishing business trying to find new ways to increase the visibility of authors at a time when book sales are flat and other forms of entertainment are commanding ever-greater portions of the public's wallet. Most publishers have extensive author information on their Web sites, and a number of authors maintain their own sites, some quite elaborate.

HarperCollins recently started a speakers bureau, and Random House announced an agreement with a lecture agency to promote public appearances by its authors. Barnes & Noble operates an online book club that enables authors to discuss their works and to answer questions from readers online.

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