A plug by Stephen Fry goes a long way on twitter

I suppose it's more of an up-to-date Oprah effect, or in the UK the Richard and Judy result.

In both cases authors who had their books featured on the respective shows saw sales rocket.

This time a similar happening took place on the micro blogging site twitter, after national treasure Stephen Fry endorsed a book of short stories about the afterlife.

Sales of David Eagleman's book Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives soared by 6,000 per cent after Fry, who has more than 750,000 followers, tweeted that "You will not read a more dazzling book this year than David Eagleman's 'Sum'.

"If you read it and aren't enchanted I will eat 40 hats."

It rose from nowhere to number two, and has also been endorsed by former Roxy Music member Brian Eno and author Philip Pullman.

Now Stephen, if you'll just give the Birmingham Mail a plug...

It's worth pointing out that the twitterati aren't exactly queuing up to buy the great man's own works: For example Fry's Moab is My Washpot currently stands at 1,162 in the sales chart at amazon in books, and The Hippopotamus is at a somewhat less than stellar 23,000!