ASK A FAN OF JASPER FFORDE what reading one of his books is like, and they will frequently talk of getting lost in another world. For a newcomer, a visit to his website has a not dissimilar effect. Like the parallel universe in which Thursday Next, Fforde’s literary detective, solves her crimes, jasperfforde.com is a place where time loses its normal meaning.

By reading about Fforde’s latest book and his promotional T-shirts, and the posts on the forum (84,771 at last count), one barely scratches the surface. There is still the option of perusing the photographs of Fforde’s surreal, alternative Swindon, or competing to win a trophy by photographing yourself with one of Fforde’s books, or visiting one of the affiliated sites for The Goliath Corporation and Specops — two fictional organisations that appear in Fforde’s books. It goes on seemingly infinitely. Most website designs begin with a tree; this one is a jungle.

One might be forgiven for imagining that the hugely popular Fforde, who has written seven Thursday Next novels in as many years, might have delegated the construction of such a labyrinthine site to his publishers. Not so. He set it up in 2001 with his girlfriend, Mari, to coincide with his debut novel, The Eyre Affair, and the pair have been working on it every day, without help, ever since.

“The web pages are a kind of after-sales service for readers who only see a new Fforde book ever year,” Fforde says. “I also see it as an extension of the books — allowing readers to dive back into that world for a little longer.” He says the website is an important part of “a reader-writer contract that I hope will induce people to keep reading me year after year”.

The geek appeal of Fforde’s books — Boys’ Own adventures with a female protagonist and an absurdist, grown-up literary twist — makes them a natural fit with web lovers, but the success of his interactive site (about 2,500 visitors a day) is also a sign of the end of an age when “author website” meant “hastily designed page with brief bio, outdated headshot and backlist”.

For the writer of nonfiction, the scope for web activity is arguably even greater. Over the past few years writers of comic memoirs such as Danny Wallace (dannywallace.com) and Andrew Collins (wherediditallgo-right.com) have added to their success by inviting readers to post experiences similar to their own on themed online message boards.

By enticing others to join a cult based on nothing (Join Me, in 2004) or go around answering “yes” to every question they are asked (Yes Man, 2005) and then report about the results, Wallace built up not so much a readership as a small army, poised to charge towards the Amazon website at the push of a button The official website of the This Diary Will Change Your Life books, benrik.co.uk, is an example of what happens when the reader involvement in a book becomes more extreme. The This Diary series, which topped the preChristmas bestseller list, makes suggestions for life-changing tasks for its readers to carry out (for example, “This week, join extremist organisations and out-extreme them”). Some 20,000 “Benrikians” (the name comes from an amalgam of the names of the Diary’s authors, Ben Carey and Henrik Delehag) are now registered on the accompanying site, with 5,000 of them charting their progress in their own Benrik blog. “We have a cult community of Benrik readers who are deeply involved in our books,” Carey says. “Not only do they write the site’s content, they also help to write the books: about a quarter of the ideas in our Diaries Will Change Your Life are reader suggestions.”

Last week Books reported on A Million Penguins,a sprawling, collaborative online novel in which members of the public write their own chapters and also edit the work of others, Wikipedia-style. And while once one might have faced a fruitless search on Google for a favourite novelist’s web-page, now such an occurrence is rare. Stephen King maintains his own web-page (stephenking.com) and www. jkrowling.com has become an important point of contact between Rowling and her fans.

It is yet to be seen, however, how more literary publishing will react to the internet age. Three of last year’s six Booker shortlisters are without an official website. Perhaps serious novelists fear that maintaining a website

can only take one away from the more important business of satisfying the muse. When asked the reason for the longish gap between his past two novels, Louis de Berniãres put it down to “answering 25 e-mails a day”.

While a site might seem like a marketing must, who’s to say every fiction writer should have a close relationship with his readers? Perhaps it isn’t such a good idea; indeed, it’s difficult to imagine the fragile psychological make-ups of Portnoy, Garp, Gats-by and even Jonathan Coe’s Ben Trotter not being damaged by having their own online incarnation.

I put profiles of some of the characters from my own book The Lost Tribes of Pop on myspace.com. I wasn’t too worried about their fate in the big, scary online out there — but I may have felt differently if I had been setting free characters from a novel, and not just a humour book aimed at the Christmas market.

I couldn’t help noticing that Holden Caulfield had his own MySpace page too. It seemed a little depressing, until I realised that this Holden was not a screwed-up kid from New York, the protagonist of Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, but a heavy metal band from West Virginia.

Tom Cox can be found on tom-cox.com and myspace.com/ lost_tribes_of_pop Jasper Fforde audiobook review, page 13

Sites we like

www.jkrowling.com Designed to look like Rowling’s wrapper-strewn, pen-cluttered desk, this is an interactive delight, and the only place for reliable Potter news.

www.iainbanks.net For the buzzing forum, in which Banks is referred to respectfully as TMH — “The Man Himself”.

susan-hill.com Veteran author and publisher sounds off in her regular blog.

www.nickhornby.co.uk Music, football, books, and plenty of top-five lists to please the anoraks.

jeanettewinterson.com Lots of fresh content (including a monthly column), stylishly packaged.

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