Self-published title is Kobo's most-read crime novel

Self-published novel One Cold Night by Katia Lief is the bestselling crime novel of the past five years on Kobo's UK platform, while Sherlock Holmes is the favourite character from classic crime novels, the e-reading company has revealed.

To mark Kobo joining as a sponsor of the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, which takes place this week, Kobo has released insights from an independent survey of the British public and its own user database.

Lief's One Cold Night, which was self-published, is the bestselling crime novel of the past five years. Self-published titles make up 15% of all of Kobo’s sales, the company said.  The original Girl with the Dragoo Tattoo trilogy by Stieg Larsson (Maclehose Press) makes the top 10 most-read crime novels on Kobo, with the first in the series, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, coming in third place, the second The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest in sixth place and the third in the series, The Girl Who Played with Fire, in seventh place. The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty (Penguin) was the second most best-selling novel and Gone Again by Doug Johnstone (Faber) was the fourth. J K Rowling’s pseudonym Robert Galbraith came in fifth place with The Cuckoo’s Calling (Sphere).

Isobel Akenhead, bookseller for Kobo UK, said: “Self-publishing is an ever-growing, increasingly professional sphere, where new authors are successfully launching themselves every day. Self-published books account for more than 15% of our UK e-book unit sales, and indeed some of our biggest bestsellers have come from the Kobo Writing Life platform. We don’t see this slowing down any time in the near future.”

Sherlock Holmes was voted the favourite character from classic crime novels, garnering almost a third of the entire vote. However, modern day characters failed to beat the classics, when asked who their favourite character was from modern day crime novels, a "striking" 59% said they didn’t have one. Robert Langdon, from The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (Corgi), did come out as the most popular character, but with just 9% of the vote. The "notorious" Amy Dunne, from the thriller/crime cult hit Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (W&N), came out as the least favourite character in modern crime novels, with less than 1% of the vote.