Interviewing an author can be fun. It helps you as a reviewer get followers, and it helps authors get more readers. A big problem has grown over the last few years. Interviewers keep asking the same questions over and over.
As authors move from one interviewer to another, the same questions get repeated. If I followed on specific interviewer, I would start to get bored as they have the same cache of questions they give each author. Needless to say, I start to ignore them all because I’ll just hear the same old things.
Let me take one step back. It is good to have a list of questions to pull from. Sometimes we are frazzled and have trouble getting ideas on what to ask. There is nothing wrong with having a list of questions to help us or even to prompt our minds to come up with something even better.
When interviewing an author, please read their book ahead of time. I’ve made that mistake several times and regretted it. If you read the book, you can discover more questions to ask that will actually get a potential reader interested in buying the book. Talk about the book and try to avoid the generic questions.
Yes, the questions I have listed could be considered generic, but I have added quite a few that many interviewers don’t ask. Also, the intent is to assist you and spoon feed you. Use these to…
