We have written on several occasions about how blogs can be a powerful tool for authors (and publishers) to connect with potential readers—not through simplistic promotional tactics, but by giving voice to a "passionate authority" and getting other people to care about the things that matter most to their authors. That's why we highly recommend Andrew Sullivan's meditation on blogging from the current issue of The Atlantic to you, even though it is primarily about the relationship between blogging and journalism—because Sullivan recognizes how blogs can function as a "more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive" form of writing that bares the souls of its writers in unprecedented ways.

"The simple experience of being able to directly broadcast my own words to readers was an exhilarating literary liberation," Sullivan recalls, even though the instantaneous feedback could be brutal. "To blog is... to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm's length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others, as Montaigne did, pivot you toward relative truth." And that's a key point—the most successful bloggers are often those who, in Sullivan's words, "create an atmosphere in which others want to participate" or, in our words, attract a community of people who share the blogger's passion and respect her authority. Bloggers who also write books are able to attract readers to those books to the extent that their blogs demonstrate that they have something meaningful to share with us... and then we find out they have a book, too.

There's a lot more to the article than this—again, we recommend any author who is being told they "need" to start a blog to promote their work take the time to read it fully. And you may come away from it thinking, "All well and good, but there's no way I could make that kind of commitment," and, honestly, that would be okay. Some people hate reading their work in public; some dread interviews; some will never bring themselves to blog. The question then is: How will you introduce yourself and your message/story to others?