On Saturday, Centuries & Sleuths Bookstore in Forest Park, Illinois kicks off a month-long celebration of its 20th anniversary.
Twenty years in the book biz!
What are the numbers? Sixty percent of start-up businesses don’t survive their first year, and 90 percent are gone before the end of their third?
So to make it 20 years, a business [...]

Glenn Beck has written a novel – The Overton Window – and I don’t intend to read it.
I picked up one of his books – An Inconvenient Book, really, that’s the title – Beck’s observations of things going on in the world . . . his observations intended to be funny. I bent a couple [...]

Let me say at the top that I have an e-book out there.
Five Star published my crime novel, Early’s Fall, last year as a hardcover book. This year, they signed a deal with Amazon to release it as a Kindle book – an e-book.
I’m new in the business, so I was tickled to have my [...]

You’ve read family histories. Pretty dry, right?
Not Leslie Huber’s The Journey Takers.
A friend of Leslie, who had read an early draft, handed the manuscript back and asked, “Who am I supposed to be cheering for?”
Georg and Mina Albrecht, Leslie’s Germany ancestors who made the journey to America? Karsti Nilsdotter, Leslie’s great-great-great-great grandmother who came here [...]

Frank DeFord is one of the best sportswriters in the country, if not the best.
In addition to the mountains of sports stories he’s written for magazines and newspapers over a long time in the business, he’s also written 16 books. His latest – a novel – is Bliss, Remembered, set in and around the 1936 [...]

In November.
And this will be the unexpurgated edition. In it is everything Twain dictated to his secretary during the last four years of his life. He died in 1910.
Twain specified that the most controversial parts of the manuscript be left out of any printed editions for a century, lest those sections damage Twain’s image or [...]

Well, to Roy Rogers’ museum.
And you’re asking what’s this got to do with books and writers?
Not a lot. Roy only wrote one book – co-wrote it, actually, with wife Dale Evans and writers Jane and Michael Stern – Happy Trails, a memoir that Simon & Schuster published in 1994.
Dale was the writer in the family.
Their [...]

A rescue helicopter almost wiped out Apollo 11 as the capsule fell toward the Pacific Ocean, says writer Scott Carmichael in Moon Men Return, his new book out from the Naval Institute Press.
Carmichael grew up in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, not far from where I live. He’s now a senior investigator with the Defense Intelligence Agency [...]

We crime writers love to cast bankers as our villains. They’ve got money, so who’s going to have any sympathy for them? And they make us grovel when we go in for a car loan.
I cast a banker as my villain in my thumb novel, Iced, last year. I had him running an investment scam.
Fellow [...]

Amazon and Barnes & Noble have had the hog’s share of the e-book market.
Yes, you can buy your e-books directly from the electronic book publishers – most of them small houses – but if you want Stephen King’s or Mary Higgins Clark’s latest book in digital, and those of other top-selling writers, you go to [...]