My new audience?

I used to see my name in print nearly every day when I worked for newspapers, and most of the time, it didn't freak me out to think that thousands of people were either reading my stories or glancing at my byline as they papertrained their puppies.

When a business school prof included one of my articles in his coursepack, and MBA friends commented that they'd just had a class discussion about the business issues raised in the article, that was a little weird. Typically as a journalist I thought of my readers as a nameless, faceless blob, not people I might have a study group with.

For some reason, it just strikes me as really odd that my amazon.com list of book recommendations has gotten more than 1,500 visits. That's a far smaller audience than even the tiniest paper I ever worked at, but since it's my personal page without the hometown newspaper's masthead above it, it seems surprising.

In case you don't believe me, here's a screen shot I just pulled tonight. The page views are listed over on the right.