Guest Blog Post by Michael Scott

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By: leahmessina, Editor

We never spoke to authors… A couple of years ago, I had to take down my fan email. There is a long note on my web page which gives the reasons, but essentially, I was overwhelmed by the response to the series.

When The Alchemyst was first published, it was an huge success (and no-one was more surprised than me.) I set up a fan mail and posted it on my website. You could write to me and I would respond. Ever weekend, I set aside several hours to go through the emails and answer them myself. In those early days, there were about 200 emails per week.

Then The Magician appeared. Suddenly there were 600 emails per week. My answers got shorter and I started only replying to the new questions. (Don’t ask me where I get my ideas from or can you read my book/play/poem/script - I’m not going to answer those!)

Then The Sorceress came out. And now it was 2000 emails per week – sometimes more. Many, many more.

I started answering the emails every day, rather than once a week, but still they came and so, reluctantly, I removed the email, and created two separate FAQ’s of the most frequently asked Flamel questions (http://www.dillonscott.com/the-secrets-of-the-immortal-nicholas-flamel/faq.htm) and non-Flamel questions: (http://www.dillonscott.com/faq.htm)

A group of fan established the fan forum (http://flamelssecret.9.forumer.com/) It is a great place for fans to gather, ask questions and post queries and soon the fans began answering one another. I pop onto the fan forum every day and answer as many questions as I can, knowing that the forum moderators will take care of the rest.

I have a Twitter account (http://twitter.com/flamelauthor) and a Facebook account (http://www.facebook.com/flamelauthor) and there are wiki pages and countless websites scattered all across the world devoted to the series.

When I was growing up, we never had the opportunity to speak to authors. You read the book, maybe wrote a fan letter and, if you were lucky, got a signed photograph back.

That’s all changed.

Readers nowadays have grown up knowing more about writers than in any previous generation. There is an expectation that the author will at least have a website, a Facebook, Twitter or MySpace account and probably a fansite or two.

Readers have extraordinary access to writers … and writers have instant access to the people who matter: the readers. Feedback from readers which previously would have taken weeks or even months, can now happen in days or hours. And that has changed everything. Writers are seen as real people, ordinary people … and more and more readers are realizing that they too can become writers.

And that’s not a bad thing at all.

(But there are still 2000 emails waiting for me to answer this weekend!)

Don't miss Michael on his next two stops on his tour:

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Michael Scott Photo Credit Perry Hagopian