Saturday, May 3, 2008

#59 a reprise - Fantastic Fiction



Thanks to Tapsister for pointing out the Fantastic Fiction website! It is truly fantastic. I tested it out for all the authors that I couldn't find on AuthorsOnTheWeb and found an extensive list of stuff (including pseudonyms, photo, list of series, dates, who writes like, forthcoming titles, audio-books, author and fan websites, links to UK and US bookstores) about Georgette Heyer, Agatha Christie, Paul Collins and Sean McMullen, all of whom I couldn't find in the previous post.

Now I know these four authors are not the be-all and end-all of fiction writing but they happen to be the ones that came into my head when I was doing the work for #59. They cover a range of genres and a large time range, two are famous world-wide and the other two are known more locally, in Melbourne to be precise. What they all have in common is that they are NOT US authors and I think that that is truly why they are not on the previous website.

Thanks, Tapsister! Fantastic Fiction is a winner for me!

Friday, May 2, 2008

#59 Authors on the web


Authors on The Web is an interesting book site with lots of stuff about authors on it. There are sections on the front page about forthcoming titles, and author news. A link takes one through to AuthorYellowPages which is a directory of author websites, though limited by the fact that these aren't collected but dependent on authors taking the initiative. Another link through featured crime/thrillers took one to a mass of info on bookreporter.com where there are reviews (organized by title which I found slightly irritating), a section on books into movies (and DVDs), lists of complete works by authors (rather limited and didn't include Georgette Heyer or Agatha Christie), searching by genre (a try at Science Fiction & Fantasy didn't find Sean McMullen or Paul Collins) and ReadingGroupGuides.


There is a wealth of information about authors here but there did seem to me to be a decidedly U.S. bias to the authors featured. As a U.S. site that is not very surprising. However, I think that as a site it is probably more useful to U.S. public libraries than to Australian ones. But it is good to know about.
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