Literature Map

I happened across an interesting website one day last week called Literature Map: A tourist map of literature.  When you go to the site, you type in the name of a writer, and the site develops a word map of other authors who write books similar to the author whose name you entered into the search box.  The site is useful for finding writers in a particular genre or who write in a particular style that you write. So, for example, if you type in “Hemingway,” you get a word map that includes Salinger, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Eggers and Wilde, among others. All are writers found in the literary canon, in this case.

I typed in my own name just for fun. The site didn’t recognize me.  No surprise there.  But when I clicked “yes” to the prompt “are you sure of the spelling?” the site added me to the database for “suggest a new writer.”  So that’s something.  Site visitors are then asked to vote to include writers in the database.  I’ll be curious to see the literature map the site creates for me as a writer of historical fiction, won’t you?  That is, if I win the election.