I know that I have talked about this before on my site…. I have gotten many suggestions regarding new authors who I should add to my site. When I first put this website together, I pretty much included only authors I had personally read. There were a few authors who I hadn’t read, but since my cozy mystery reader friends had recommended them, I felt that they could be added to my list. I tried to add a small note on the site that explained I hadn’t read any of that particular author’s books…. yet.
At first, I thought that I wouldn’t add new authors unless I tried them first, or one of my personal friends endorsed them. Now, with all of the new suggested authors, I have changed my mind. As I have stated before, I am not an unusually fast reader. If I tried every suggested author before I posted his/her chronological list of cozy mysteries, I wouldn’t be adding very many of those authors each year. I have many cozy mystery authors who I follow, who take up most of my reading time already.
Once I have an author’s name, I then go about looking up information about that author. I try to run down the author’s website, which, if I can, makes my chronological list of books a lot easier to get together. Unfortunately, many authors don’t have a website, which then means that I have to do web searches for the author, and then try to piece together what I can. (I remember… years ago……. how I found out the chronological order of an author’s books: I would go to the library, pull out all of a particular author’s books, and then check each copyright date. As I said…….. "years ago!">>>> and oh, I would then return the books to the correct library shelf location…)
Anyway, right now I am in the midst of adding several new authors to the site. (By "new," I mean "new" to me.) I know that a lot of the site’s users follow these cozy mystery authors………. and eventually, I probably will too!
Anita Havens says
I am a new mystery author, just published in March. It is good to see someone who is actually trying to HELP new authors! I have learned a lot about the term, cozy mystery, but am not sure my work actually falls under this category. There is no graphic sex, but several flashback chapters have dialogue from moonshiners and revenuers and their langauge may be a problem. The “s” word and “d” word are used frequently by these rough characters. Would this keep my work from falling in the cozy mystery category?
cozy mystery list says
I don’t think that a few "s" and "d" words would keep you out of the cozy category. I am currently thinking of one author who has several books out who has a sprinkling of such words………. and that’s from her animal characters!