Most authors participate, reluctantly or enthusiastically, in a cycle of promotion, including book tours, literary festivals, interviews, and now social media. Some authors make regular use of Twitter to post updates about professional activities, comments on events in their everyday lives, news of readings, statements of opinions, photos, links, or retweets. This study examines tweets by 10 authors, using corpus linguistic tools to find stylistic patterns characteristic of the corpus as a whole or of individual authors. The article then looks at tweets by others that mention the authors or use quotations from the authors in new contexts, creating an online presence for authors whether they tweet themselves or not. Authors are subject to the same tension between ordinariness and specialness that others have noted with stars in music, television, film, or fashion. Literature, because of its assumed cultural position, and its production in private, has sometimes been seen as being apart from and opposed to the cultural system of celebrity and promotion. But this cultural position also means the ordinariness of authors is treated as surprising and interesting, while the specialness makes them available to all as oracles.