James Patterson’s underwhelming new blog

You may have heard of Amazon Connect, the effort by Amazon.com to host authors’ blogs on its Web site. We’d heard that James Patterson, best-selling author and former JWT creative director, is among those who’ve signed on. And here it is: James Patterson’s Amazon blog. It’s pretty skimpy so far. It seems like he’ll take questions from readers and answer them. There’s one question up at this point—about whether he’s ever written under an alias. “Yes, J.K. Rowling is a name I sometimes use,” he writes. “I’m kidding. So far I haven’t written anything I don’t want to put my real name on. I try to keep aliases confined to the characters in my books.” Yet he does pretty much the same thing in the “Patterson Mailbag” section of his Web site, JamesPatterson.com. So what’s the point of the blog? Can’t he write about the Gastineau girls or something?

—Posted by Tim Nudd

February 3, 2006 | Permalink