You’ve been using the Internet as an excellent tool for marketing your work and getting readers a behind-the-scenes seat on being an author; what led to you taking that path?
There are some authors out there who are really good at sitting down and blogging about themselves or whatever’s on their mind and building a following of likeminded people, but I actually find that a bit of a struggle. Perhaps writing fiction kind of sucks away all of the “writing juices” from me, leaving me unmotivated to write anything promotional. Or perhaps it’s because I’m really a recluse at heart. I want people to read my fiction, but I don’t necessarily care if they know about the man behind the screen. He’s not important–only the story matters. So while I do manage to do some of the normal blogging things–talking about my life and the creative process–I also see my website and blog as an opportunity to give back to the fans. In the publishing world, a lot of time passes between one book’s release and the next’s, and I hope that giving my readers something to read regularly while they’re waiting is a good way to keep my books in their mind. If someone who reads a book by me puts my name into a search engine, I want something interesting to show up–I think of a lot of my website content in terms of the bonus content you get on a special edition DVD. The biggest example of this is the chapter-by-chapter annotations I post regularly–think of them as the director’s commentary track that you can listen to while you watch a movie, usually on the second or third watching of a movie you like. You can read a chapter or section of the book, then read my companion discussion of that particular section. The annotations alone add a lot of text to the reading experience–the annotations for Mistborn 3: The Hero of Ages that I’ll start posting soon total 40,000 words, which is long enough to be called a novel in its own right (though my novels themselves are quite a bit longer than that). Also like on a DVD, you can find deleted scenes and alternate endings on my website–earlier drafts that I had to discard but which the readers might find interesting. And I do like to let people know the status of the projects I’m currently working on, with handy progress bars in one corner of the page.
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