Meryl Evans and I were talking the other day about the relationships between readers and authors. I came across AuthorTracker from publisher HarperCollins. It’s an email notification service that notifies you when your favorite authors release new books, go on tour, and when excerpts are available. It’s a great marketing tool for publishers while it gives fans easy access to their fave authors. Why don’t more publishers have something like this? Amazon for many years has had the ability to notify customers when they stock a new book by an author or subject.

You can read more on Meryl’s blog here about other tools and authors who have joined the wired generation.

Speaking of enlightened publishers, sci-fi fans probably know about Baen. They have taken the open distribution model to heart and over the past several years have put a wonderful number of books online, free for the downloading. Too bad the music industry doesn’t get this model: the more of a back catalog you have for free, the more people will pay for the stuff. It is all about developing the relationship with the reader.