Western Fiction News

WILLIAM JOHNSTONE / J.A. JOHNSTONE

Many new books have been announced, including new series, and a new book in a series I thought long passed by. There hasn’t been a new book in the Town Called Fury series since 2007 but July 2011 will see the publication of the fourth titled Redemption.

New books will be appearing in all the main series as well as J.A. Johnstone’s Loner series. New series include MacAllister: The Eagles Legacy and Savage Texas.

BLACK HORSE WESTERNS

For the past few months Hale have upped the number of Black Horse Westerns they publish each month from seven to eight.

So with this increase and the Johnstone family putting out new series does this mean the western might be becoming a little more popular?

BLACK HORSE EXTRA

The latest edition of Black Horse Extra can be found here. As usual it contains an excellent mix of articles, observations and chat.

The main theme of BHE#20 is what books writers read and there are some great thoughts and reflections from Keith Hetherington. Three other writers also comment on their reading material, these authors being Nik Morton, Matthew P. Mayo, and Gary Dobbs.

There’s also a fascinating article by Greg Mitchell on the history of the telegraph.

DORCHESTER

Seems Dorchester has a new CEO who is, apparently, making big changes to solve the problems within the company that has stated it’s not on the verge of bankruptcy.

It’s said that Dorchester will now begin to sell paperback’s starting in January 2011, possibly fuelled by the many complaints of readers not being able to get paper books by their favourite authors. Whether these will be regular mass-market paperbacks or trade paperbacks only time will reveal. These will be available through normal retail outlets such as B&N and Amazon. They will still be producing ebooks in a big way.

Let’s all hope the above comments turn out to be true.

A FEW STATS

It would seem that the interviews I do are some of the most viewed items I post on this blog. There’s almost always six of them in the top ten slots of the all-time posts with cover artist Ken Laager usually claiming top place. Ralph Cotton can be found in second place regularly too – is this because both of these people have links to WFR on their own sites? The only other artist I’ve interviewed, Tony Masero, has never been lower than fourth place.

At one time there was only one book in the top ten, and this often claims second spot, this being The Outlaw Josey Wales. I reckon this gets many hits from people searching for the film as much as the book. Since reviewing Beat to a Pulp, this has claimed sixth place as it’s own. The only other book in the top ten is Larry D. Sweazy’s The Rattlesnake Season.

And just where do the majority of my blogs readers come from? Yeap, America. Over three times the number of visitors to second placed UK. Filling out the rest of the top ten are: Canada, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Australia, Denmark, France, and finally Brazil.

By far the majority of people searching for the blog use either google com or UK and the site that many people link to WFR from is James Reasoner’s Rough Edges – thanks for adding the link James.