Despite the click-bait tite, I am thinking about a couple of factors. First, the context I'm considering is specifically about inviting well-known/published authors to an AMA. I'm posting this question here, because most authors write in one or maybe two genres, and the authors I'd like to see answer AMAs are fantasy and sci-fi authors. I haven't yet come across any "big name" AMAs in any community yet, but I'm impatient.
- Reach: the largest subscriber size I see is !books@lemmy.world. The issue there is that the topic is rather broad, but to make an AMA worthwhile for the author, I'd think the larger the audience the better.
- Moderation. Doing an AMA well is significant work. There's advertisement to reach people who may not be subscribed but who may be interested; there's reaching out to the author and coordinating the details; and then there's moderation to prevent it from being overrun by trolls.
- Interest. I haven't been on Reddit in a couple of years now, but something thing I miss is AMAs from authors I'm reading. Some, like Scalzi, had a Reddit account and both did AMAs and also responded directly to random posts aimed at him. I'm aware that it's possible I'm in a minority and the Lemmy community at large isn't interested in AMAs, and while I doubt that, it's still something that'd need to be cleared with whichever community hosted the AMA
- Adjacently, I wonder how many authors lurk on Lemmy, and how would one find out? Is there a channel where authors could express willingness?
I feel a hole here, and I'm not going to fill it with Reddit. It's an area where I think a federated platform like Lemmy may be at a disadvantage to a platform like Reddit: with Reddit, it's pretty clear who might host any given AMA, and Lemmy's decentralized -- and often redundant -- communities complicate matters.
I've been on a Miles Cameron binge lately, and have a couple of questions I'd like to ask him; I could write him through his publisher, but I find AMAs to be much more interesting.
Is Lemmy ready for AMAs?