IT'S A CRIME! (OR A MYSTERY...)

London Book Fair 2011 Day One - Best Tweet

The most entertaining tweet spotted yesterday has to be this one, surely?

@ShortfirePress: Overheard outside #lbf11: 'There must be some kind of literary fair going on; everyone is air-kissing and using words that don't exist.'

Super!  And it takes a literary type to tweet using a semi-colon...

Mwah, mwah darlings.

Frankfurt Book Fair 2009 - Summary Day 2

Today's The BooksellerDaily can be found here.  Crime and thriller fiction related includes:

• A debut thriller Sympathy for the Devil from Howard Marks is selling well overseas.  In the UK, Harvill Secker will publish it in August 2010.  It's set in Wales, with a female copper and is the first in a series.
• Faber has bought two books in a "standout" series from US-based Sara Gran.  City of the Dead is the first and it's due in spring 2011.  It features private detective Claire DeWitt.
• In the international charts: China doesn't seem to like crime fiction; the US top ten lists the ususal suspects; Stieg Larsson shows at number 5 for Ireland; Australia has come over all Dan Brown (no. 1), but Larsson features at 7 and 10.

Frankfurt Book Fair 2009 - Summary No. 1

The Frankfurt Book Fair is underway and no, I am not there.  Luckily, The Bookseller is and earlier today I downloaded their first BooksellerDaily publication which you see by clicking here.  In the meantime, this is a summary from crime and thriller fiction-related entries:

• Maria Rejt at Pan Macmillan has bought British and Commonwealth rights to Scott Turow's sequel of Presumed Innocent.  It follows the follows the developments in the lives of the characters 22 years later and will be published in May 2010.
• In 2011, Pan Mac will publish the first in an Arctic-set crime series from Melanie McGrath, called White Heat.  It features a female Inuit detective.
• Century and Arrow publisher, Kate Elton has bought world English rights to The Editor by journalist J. A. Osborne.  The debut has been described as "terrifying and utterly compelling" and features a female heroine in the form of the FBI's Dana Whitestone on the case of a serial killer re-enacting famous murders from the twentieth century.  Due: spring 2011.
• In the fiction charts, it appears that the French, Italians and the Danish love a Larsson (Stieg) as much as the Brits, although topping the Danish chart at the moment is a title from Sweden's Camilla Lackberg which translates as "The German Brat".  The Germans are not without a thumbs up to crime fiction however, as Simon Beckett's Whispers of the Dead comes in at number two.  This was beaten to the number one slot by Charlotte Roche's Wetlands, a novel argued as being erotica, extreme feminism or downright depravity, but never a combination of any of the three.
• Lastly, there's an advert for MAXCRIME from John Blake Publishing which features the impending title Old Dogs from Donna Moore (April 2010).

See the link above to read the rest.  (Downloading the pdf is simple by the way and leads to an easier read.)

A revolutionary new book concept from the Netherlands.

September 6 and 7 saw the "festive opening of the new book season" in the Netherlands with Manuscripta in Amsterdam (pdf in English here).  While the rest of the world is still coming to grips with e-Readers, Kindles and the like, this book fair introduced a new book concept, launched with the assistance of crime writing duo Nicci French.  Called the dwarsligger - which translates as "sleeper" - the book is a hard copy and was described by Sean French as "the size of a match box, almost".  The aim is to make the book much smaller and therefore more portable.  The average weight comes in at 145 grms.  In the Netherlands prices are comparable to existing PB formats, and distribution is planned for the Netherlands and Belgium.

There is a video of the launch here, where you can see the size of a dwarsligger production versus an existing publication.  When Nicci Gerrard and Sean French go on holiday Sean French normally takes a rucksack of books, but in the future said Nicci Gerrard, they will be able to take a handbag of books.

The question is: could it catch on here and elsewhere?  What do you think of the dwarsligger?  Would you like a book in this format?

(Photo taken from Reformatorisch Dagblad, with more info at the link, but in Dutch.)

The London Book Fair 2008

I shouldn't be here.  I should be in bed.  I've been at the London Book Fair today and yesterday, also meeting up with a group of treasured blogging friends yesterday.  I've been before, but last time it was for a seminar only.  This time it was much broader in scope.  It was an eye-opener in terms of how publishers view book blogs and I will post on that later.

But it was great to catch up with blogging friends, old and new; great to meet you all, again or for the first time, but this time in person, in all cases.

I came away with even more insight into the publishing industry, which is what I sought.  A well-spent and grand two days.  Of which, more later...