Under the auspices of its Vintage Crime/Black Lizard imprint, Vintage Books is launching the Weekly Lizard, a mobile-optimized online site devoted to news and feature content about crime and mystery writing. While the Weekly Lizard is designed to attract readers interested in crime, mystery and thrillers from many publishers, the site’s focus is on Vintage Books and other Random House authors and titles, which can also be purchased through a link to the Random House Web site.
The Weekly Lizard will offer content under several topical sections on the site, including In the Lineup (author profiles and essays); Tough Guys and Dangerous Dames (profiles of mystery characters); Wiseguy Quotes (quotes from classic crime novels); and excerpts from forthcoming novels. And in the In The Dark section, The Lizard will also offer updates on film news and forthcoming movie releases as well as TV shows. The site offers comment and discussion posts as well as links to social media.
The site joins such efforts as Macmillan's Tor.com (which does not sell Tor titles) and Random House’s Suvudu.com (which does offer RH titles for sale), publisher-sponsored online communities aimed at the fans of broad publishing categories, that allow the publishers to market their titles and in some cases sell direct to consumers.
The Vintage Crime/Black Lizard list features such writers as Chester Himes, Eric Ambler, Ross Macdonald, Lisa Unger, Stella Rimington, Carl Hiaasen, Andrew Vachss and Ruth Rendell.
