blog three

For my response, I took a look at several authors’ blogs, but in particular, I looked at the facebook of Author Tom Clancy. I admittedly absolutely hate reading anything but harry potter books basically and have not actually read anything by him, but I think if I were to take the time to read his books I would really enjoy them. That being said, and on to the matter at hand, if you look at his facebook page or the page of basically any of the other authors, more or less what you will see is a whole lot of advertisement. It makes sense one hundred percent to take advantage of the marketing hotspot, but at the same time I feel like it sells the author short so to speak: In my opinion, a blog for literary figures like these, is a place where the author and their fans have a meeting of minds and voice their opinions on the author and have his works, and show their appreciation for what they have given them in their lives, yet all I see upon examining Tom Clancy’s page is just his posting advertisements for his new books and a movie that he was involved in that just came out. What are your opinions on the topic?

 As I said before it makes perfect sense for them to do this and I don’t necessarily fault him for this, but it just feels a little wrong to me. As was pointed out in another blog, the page of author J.K. Rowling for the harry potter series is riddled with posts by fans voicing their appreciation and telling how harry potter changed their lives (I can speak to that a little as well). This is more so what I envisioned when undergoing this little research role. I guess that really can be greatly attributed to the nature of the harry potter series and the devout following that the series has (very long series where many people grew up with and it followed them into their adult life and has become a part of them) as opposed to the individual novels that an author like tom Clancy would usually produce that tend to attract a more serious crowd that are probably in my vision of them, less inclined to post about this kind of thing on a social media site. Do you think the target audience and types of books have a significant impact on this type of thing?

After looking at all of this and thinking about it, my opinion is that authors having an active social media account can really be a great thing and represent a great chance to further engage their fans and build an even bigger and better following. Or, it can just be used as an internet billboard more or less  which in my opinion is a little bit of an abuse of power, understandable as it may be, because after all it is there job and how they make a living, but still it seems a little out of context.