Buried among hundreds of comments below yet another podcast featuring a recently published author was one line that seemed amusingly true. “One more interview,” someone wrote, “and you’ll have recorded the audiobook.”
Amid many potshots and snarky takes that social media throws up, this one stayed with me. It registered pithily as something that has quietly become normal. Authors today speak so much about their books that the conversation surrounding a book sometimes threatens to sideline the actual text and reading of the book itself. In some ways, the idea of authorship in an age of the attention economy has meant that many authors are seen and heard far more on screens than they are actually read.
