A good article, thanks for the link. The only item I have some slight disagreement with is that last. Sure there are some readers that obviously like internet-social interaction with an author, but I'm not convinced that this can ever be anything more than a very small proportion of readers - who are quite likely fans whether you have a twitter/facebook/blog account or not.
Yes famous authors may have lots of followers, but that's not to say they are famous because they have lots of followers, rather - most of the time - they have lots of followers because they are famous. How critical social networking is to establishing fame is much less apparent. A twitter account, facebook page and blog are all useless when no one knows who you are. You start be being found where the readers are - and that's not on your blog (or certainly not on mine
).
I can suppose that producing lots (that people want to read) is a way to keep your presence active in conversations and so increase your fan base that way. (We talked of a catalogue of books in another thread.) But I see this as quite distinct from social networking.
Of course, I'm not famous, so perhaps I can blame it on my lack of social skills.
