Publisher and Author Pages

Seth Godin's latest blog entry is promoting one of his projects, Squidoo, but he does make a good point: not all authors have blogs or personal websites and typically, publishers create web pages for them:

Authors hate to promote themselves. And lots of authors don't like the web so much, at least when it comes to promotion. It's not like traveling to an independent bookstore and having tea with the owner while you sign books, or being interviewed for the book section of the Times. Your favorite author probably doesn't have a blog, probably doesn't spend all her time online.

So, instead of a significant web presence that's author-driven, we end up with publishers building their own promo sites (this one has just 40 (!) authors and cost a fortune to build) or we get publishers insisting that all their authors build MySpace pages (just last week, in fact).