I had some fun with the word cloud creating website www.wordle.net and inputted all the reviews for my book Catchee Monkey. The results were interesting.

The character’s names show up biggest, which makes sense since it is also name of the series – Rex & Eddie Mysteries. Next up was “book,” “read,” and “story;” which are obvious words to use in a review. Following that is the word “funny” and that’s fantastic. As the author I can call my book a comedy, but only the reader can call it funny. I can, of course, quote the reader.

Other words that pop out are “British,” “detective,” “mystery,” “first,” and “humor” (the spelling shows it’s the American’s that have written the most reviews).

I can also tell people are looking “forward” to the sequel, or a “movie” adaptation. One word that stood out was “Hardy.” Catchee Monkey had been compared to Laurel and Hardy a few times but Laurel doesn’t show up as big on the word cloud. This confused me for a bit but I realised it’s because my book has also been compared to the Hardy Boys, a US mystery book series for teens. I’ve been looking for ways to pitch the book series and found “Laurel & Hardy meets Philip Marlowe” is the best description. Maybe from now on I can call Rex and Eddie “the Laurel and Hardy Boys.”