How often do you talk to the writer/reader?

The whole goal behind my writing is to get others to chat about it. I am seriously excited to get a bunch of other people as excited about as I am. I have the comments section open and everything, but I thought I'd try to talk to people more by a) blogging a bit (it's not really my thing, but I'm trying), and b) adding Author's Notes between arc breaks.

Do you feel comfortable talking to writer of the stories you like? Is it easier if it's online like mine and you can go straight into the comments or email, or does talking to them feel a little awkward?

Do you enjoy talking to other readers? Would you rather have a story where you never actually talk to the writer at all, but discuss plot points or characters or whatever else with other people following along?

Most importantly, as a writer, how often do you talk to your readers about the story? I know there are tons of people here who blog about other things, but as far as churning out new content on your work, do you keep that to a minimum? Do your readers prefer it?

Published author speaking here.

I'll talk to any member of my reader base who wants to converse with me about what I've written and I'll listen to whatever they've got to say...I call this "keeping in touch with my customer base", which means I'm willing to hear the bad stuff too. I have to be, if I want my product to keep ending up on their bookshelves.

A problem I've observed; too many authors regard their work the way certain over-protective parents regard their children...as in, everything's perfect and how dare you question anything about it. This leads to readers who won't be honest with writers, and writers who can't get honest feedback about their work. In both cases this is a bad thing as far as I'm concerned.

But yeah, I like engaging readers in discourse about what I've put out there; I feel as long as everybody's on the level it is a chance for me as a writer to learn how to be better at the craft.

I do enjoy conversing with the author about their work. Having a dialouge with them over the characters and why things are this way is great. Even more so if you can influence the story, however slightly.

I've seen some web serial authors go the extreme end of audience participation by having the readers vote. I'm not crazy about that, and I don't think I would do it myself, but - man. That gets a lot of results, as far as I can tell, and I love looking at how eager readers get for the next part when they know they have more say in it.

The most I can do is make myself seem friendly and open to talking. Well, that's not true: the most I can do is write something good enough that's worth talking *about*, so I guess until I have enough under my belt, maybe I should open the story up to readers...?

If they contact me, or leave a public review, I almost always reply somehow if I can.