I have been quite rightly chided for failing to celebrate Thursday's triumph at the Crime Writers' Association awards. Ann Cleeves the Duncan Lawrie Dagger award for her book Raven Black. This is the biggest crime writing prize in the world, completely deserved and wonderful for one of Macmillan's (and Pan's) favourite authors.

Another Macmillan author, Malcolm Mann, has written twelve English language teaching texts for us and there are more in the pipeline. He has just launched a new website called Manifesto UK which is an experiment in online democracy. Do try it out.

The number of visitors to this blog in June was 27169, 19% ahead of May. I'm sure the world cup, soaring European and North American temperatures and the holiday season will slow the growth over the next few months. Nonetheless in the interests of finding out more about the web by doing rather than theorising I've been trying to register with Google Adwords in order to generate revenues to pay for my overheads. So far the process has defeated us but we're trying - so expect to see some ads at some point.

This morning I've been reading my favourite magazine - the Summer issue of The Author published by The Society of Authors. It is, in my opinion, by far the most important reading material for publishers. Of course I don't agree with everything in it but if we don't understand authors' concerns we'll never get anywhere. It also has the merit of being written mainly by professional authors and so the literary quality is superior to other such association publications. It's not obvious ho0w to subscribe but perhaps an email to theauthor@societyofauthors.org might do the trick. A flavour of the contents of this issue - Publishers internet strategies, A positive view of the Wattakars bid, The long-anticipated development of e-paper, Authors as limited companies etc.