The appeal of the procedural is built upon a simple human desire: we love to solve problems, and we love to watch others solve them. Even better when solving a problem feels like revealing a hidden connection beneath the skin of the world.
Though her knitwear patterns had previously been published in books and magazines, Reagan Davis was ready to spin a different kind of yarn.
A longtime fan of the cozy mystery - wholesome whodunits more in the vein of Agatha Christie than John Grisham - the Ontario-based Davis decided to self-publish the first three books in her "Knitorious Murder Mysteries" series.
We all read crime novels, and all crime novels feature guns (more or less). When I got to work on my own crime novel-my first, after cutting my teeth on Napoleonic spy thrillers-I wanted to make sure I knew my stuff. It's a contemporary heist thriller about counterfeiting, art forgery, neo-Nazis and a horseback-Amtrak train robbery. Guns are involved. Read more
Murder is a grisly, nasty business...except in the cozy mystery subgenre, where bloodless murders are the order of the day. If the words "cozy" and "murder" sound like an oxymoron when used in the same sentence, you're not alone. The subgenre can seem downright baffling to outsiders at first glance. There is, however, a method to the madness.
In a novel, an effective setting transports the reader, immersing them in the narrative and creating a believable physical environment where plot can flourish. Read more
The average victim of a kidnapping is dead less than 48 hours from the point of abduction. Captivity is an unusual choice for a murderer, both in life and in fiction. It requires resources, introduces variables, and produces a bizarre form of intimacy. What scares us most about captivity-centered narratives is that they break the immediacy and predictability of even the grisliest murders. Read more
The ring of the doorbell, the pop of a champagne cork, a peal of laughter from another room. Wicked gossip, a meaningful glance across the dining table, a knife secreted in a napkin. The host must step away for just a moment to take an urgent phone call, would you all keep yourselves occupied? No, nothing is the matter. Unless something is?
In 1859, workers at a dock in New York City noticed that a barrel that had been shipped into town smelled particularly foul and decided to open it up. Read more
In a follow to Monday's (August 30) update on the United States' market, NPD BookScan's research team has released a genre-specific look at the thriller and suspense category, finding that US sales have dropped six percent in the last year. Read more
'I was trained by poetry where you can just write ambience and atmosphere. But in a novel, if there's not a story that people are interested in, with characters that they care about, they'll close the book.'
In the third in a series on the implications of AI for publishing, Nadim Sadek argues that effective advertising is now feasible for everyone, and for all kinds of titles
A publishing friend of mine recently told me about a sales report they'd received from a major retailer in which some of their books had zero sales. It turned out that there had been plenty of sales, however-they just all went to counterfeiters. In case you think this is an outlier, it's not. Counterfeiting is a serious, nontrivial problem facing the industry.
If you read the recently unsealed materials from the federal antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, you'll see why the company wanted to keep them under wraps. According to the unredacted notes from one meeting, Jeff Bezos directed his team to stuff more ads into search results, even if it meant accepting more ads internally categorized as irrelevant to what users were looking for. Read more
The U.K. Publishers Association (PA) was established in 1896 and is a cornerstone of the British publishing industry, working with a diverse array of companies to promote innovation, collaboration, and commercial success. Read more
With English as a shared language, there is a natural relationship between the American and British publishing industries. Most of the world's top publishing companies, be they conglomerates or independent publishers, have operations in each country, typically in New York City and London. Literary traffic travels both ways across the Atlantic.
The UK is experiencing a boom in book clubs, according to new data from event listing companies.
Book club listings on the ticketing site Eventbrite increased by 350% between 2019 and 2023 - a "much stronger" growth than the overall increase in UK-based listings over the same period. Between 2022 and 2023 alone, book club listings on the site rose by 41%. Read more
"We don't understand the consequences of AI with regards to copyright," Brazil's Karine Gonçalves Pansa, president of the International Publishers Association (IPA), said, when asked to name the most important issues facing publishing right now. "We can say, very easily, that our content is being used, without permission, and without license, by AI."