A post on the fly

I only have time for a quick flyby tonight:

I haven't heard of crime-fiction author David Rosenfelt before, but he's onto a good thing - not only has he found it useful to print his email address in his books (yes, readers have interesting things to say, and it is nice to interact with them), but now he's gone to the next stage and started blogging (as the week's guest blogger on Moments in Crime, the St Martin's Minotaur blog). Hmm, might even catch on, this blogging idea.

Euro Crime may have gone to France, but she's still blogging by magic - here are a few summer reading recommendations, as identified by the newspapers, with links to Euro Crime reviews where they exist.

And Susan Hill has a most perceptive post here, about readers' loyalty. She points out the Poisson distribution of Richard and Judy picks: a huge spike in sales of the chosen books, but no extrapolation to additional purchases of the selected authors' other titles. She contrasts this with the reading behaviour of us crime-fiction addicts, whose "author loyalty" is rock-solid, no marketing required, please note. (And eat your heart out, Julian Barnes.)

Finally, you may have read about the CrimeFest meeting in Bristol earlier this month on various blogs. The nearest thing to an actual conference report is now up at the Rap Sheet, in an absorbing post (said to be first of three) by Ali Karim.

Comments

[Michael Walters]

It's an interesting piece by Susan Hill - speaking personally, I hope she's right! Perhaps Julian Barnes should go back to the crime fiction he produced as Dan Kavanagh. I'm still loyally enthusiastic about those even though it's over 20 years since the last one.