I respond to every email. I sign every autograph for every person.
Customers or employees are free to shoot me email. I may not respond to every single one because sometimes the numbers are voluminous, but I read them all.
I only know what it's like to be an author with social media. I can't compare. I do think we lose the mystery of the author. Today, I get tons of e-mails and Facebook messages from readers, and my goal with Twitter and Facebook is, if someone reaches out to me, I'm going to respond to them. I don't want to be an elitist author who is untouchable. I'm just a regular person, too. I will always respond to everybody.
Imagine, if you will, you're sitting at my desk in Hawaii. You have access to the entire world, as far as you can see it. Last several days, content of internet communications. Every email that's sent. Every website that's visited by every individual. Every text message that somebody sends on their phone. Every phone call they make.
I avoid Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and if I need to communicate with someone, I email direct.
I might seem biased, but I use Evernote every day. It came to me through my readers, who I'd asked for software recommendations via Twitter and Facebook. For seemingly every function, the answer was 'Man, you have to use Evernote.'
Twitter is fun because it lets me stay in touch with all my original readers who grew up with my books. I love hearing from readers instantly on Twitter.
There's always something in new technology that promotes anxiety on the one hand, but also grieving on the other. With the internet, I think we can remember a time when people said "I don't use email," or "I'm not going to get email." I once had to do a piece on people who had never used the internet and refused to start and I found three people. But when I talked to them, they had used it, at some point or another. It's almost impossible to stay off the internet entirely. We feel as though we didn't get to make a decision. There's this new dawn and we all have to embrace it.
Things like email, and Twitter, and Facebook, and text messaging - they all work reasonably well. But we use them because they're convenient, and cheap, and easy, not because they're the best way to communicate with somebody.
Every solution to every problem is simple. It's the distance between the two where the mystery lies.
My younger son told me nobody uses email anymore. I'm this old fogie with my email. I don't know what I'm supposed to communicate with now - SnapChat?
People are morons. I don't do any social media stuff. I have people telling me all the time, "You should do Twitter, you should do this, you should get on Facebook." Are you insane? I'm not doing any of that crap. I stay the hell off that thing. Every once in a while, I send a business email, and that's it.
I just got on Twitter because there was some MTV film blog that quoted me on something really innocuous that I supposedly said on Twitter before I was even on Twitter. So then I had to get on Twitter to say: 'This is me. I'm on Twitter. If there's somebody else saying that they're me on Twitter, they're not.'
There are people I've blocked for a long time who will still respond to every single person that replies positively to me on Twitter. I have quite a few cyber-stalkers like that.
The least-crowded channel for meeting high profile bloggers is in person. Email is the most difficult, the most crowded... I'm a top 1,000 blogger, not a top 100 blogger, and I get hundreds of pitches by email every week. Most of them I don't even see because my assistant declines them.
Every morning as I begin my work day, my computer presents me with the usual array of garbage: email, Twitter, updates on the state of the nation, updates on the state of the sneakers I just ordered.