Blogs are one of the things I've noticed are quite different between music and books. I was talking to a friend a while ago who is a musician. He made a bit of an off the cuff remark about being caught inbetween shows or soundcheck by perfectly lovely youngster who wanted to do an interview for his "really influential" website. Of course the joke is he's just got a blog with a lot of arty photos and obscure interviews that him and some of his friends check from time to time and compete over. Makes me think of the kid in Jonathan Franzen's Freedom who begs the fictional aging indie icon Katz to do an interview for his blog so he can get a girl in his class to sleep with him. Katz has some fun with him.
But anyway, the point is in the music industry you usually can't fall over on the internet without bumping into an interview with a musician. Its a sociable world, its the nature of the beast and its demographic too. For that reason over at Domino we never invested much time in commissioning or writing our own interviews with artists.
The book publishing world is quite different. Writing is (usually) a solitary practice. It requires an investment of time on the part of the reader and there's little coincidental contact between the writer and fan. There are plenty of review blogs out there and but interviews really come way further down the line for most. So how do authors who are just starting out get some info out about their intentions and thoughts behind their books? Google most first time authors names and you won't find much about them. For that reason at Quercus we try to do a Q&A a week. They're basic but they help frame an author's work better than a standard biog can do. Strangely their format and tone are very similar to the music interviews I did as part of the (now defunct) amazon editorial team.
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