The Hartsock Agency

If you’re an author and you’ve not yet ventured into the newly revamped Amazon Author Central (beta) platform, please, please, please do so now.

At  Author Central, you have a bevy of ready-made tools designed by the bookselling and bookreading techno geeks at Amazon. All of these tools empower your to share information about yourself and your work with your readers — you can view and edit your bibliography, add a photo and biography to a personal profile, and use a blog to connect with readers.

Geez Louise, this makes me want to finish my book so I too can be front and Web-face forward on Author Central too!

Don’t miss out on the sample link to Neil Gaiman’s page. And take a moment to imagine him cast in a new part for the Twilight movies. I think he’s really trying to move that mojo with the picture he has up there.:>)

My fave is my client Bill Scheft’s page because Bill is really starting to dig all these new ways to connect with people. Bill is also proof that you can teach an amazing humor novelist and 18 year David Letterman show writer new Web tricks.

Bill will also be a keynote at the Erma Bombeck Writers Conference this year (Twitter: @ebww)  and he will be at the Texas Book Festival. (He writes a snappy blog too!)

I also notice at the Texas Book Fest that Buzz Aldrin will be speaking. I’m excited about this. I interviewed him years ago about his science fiction novel in Dallas, and he could not have been more gracious.

My favorite part of the interview was where I stupidly asked him (after weeks of watching old Apollo films for background) why they were doing different gaits across the moon.

“Mr. Aldrin,” I asked, “Did you all try those different gaits across the moon because you wanted to calculate differences between running, skipping, hopping?” (Oy vey, to be  a young dumb journalist again.)

And he said (without a smile), “For God-sakes no. Young lady, we were on the moon! We were skipping because we were on the moon!” (Duh!)

He also had a great perspective on being the second man on the moon.

Buzz at the time was also  in deep planning about his idea for a tourist service around space travel. I’m going to have to dig up the whole interview and post it as a PDF on the blog now.

Speaking of new frontiers, don’t forget to register on another fantastic author platform and one of my own personal faves – Filedby.com . If I was still a technology journalist my prediction would be that in two years from now, this is really the only author community you will need to be on.