Your favorite authors. Their favorite books.

That’s just great. We are all just getting our heads around the fact that Facebook is the new web, that twitter is a hugely important tool for building our brand… and along comes Google +. Yet another place to suck up our time and draw attention away from the real work of writing, or selling or whatever it is we do.

At first it seemed like this would be just another failed attempt by Google to gain ground on its social competitors, a place where it has consistently missed the mark. But something is clicking with this one and while its too early to tell for sure, every indication is that Google + is going to establish enough momentum to demand our attention.

What does this mean for authors and the world of books? Well for authors if you want to connect with readers, like it or not, you have to be where they are. If G+ has 10million members after what is less than a few weeks, then its a place where at least a few of your current or potential readers are hanging out.  The full feature set isn’t apparent yet but its likely to mirror many of the things you see on facebook and elsewhere and maybe do them better. Private and public chat rooms, sharing of excerpts, notification of tours, all of those things are either possible now or will be soon. Right now you can’t create a page that is a dedicated business or fan page but word is that is coming in the coming months. So my guess is that its worth the time to sign up and start building a network, maybe you’ll be a pioneer of the next big thing. And for a small investment of time that seems like a decent trade off at this point.

I just started to build my network up on G+ and so far its a positive experience. There’s no immediate pay off that makes it feel substantially different from Facebook, but its a clean and powerful interface and the privacy controls are really well set up.

I’ll be posting a series of video interviews from RWA and ThrillerFEst  over the coming weeks – in editing now, very exciting- and I’ll use G+ as well as Facebook to share them. Come find me and let me know what you think.