I’m getting very busy now that I’ve caught the ebook bug.  On Amazon and Smashwords I just published a self-help ebook called Finnegan’s Way: The Secret Power of Doing Things Badly.  I also plan to publish two more ebooks in the next couple of months.  One will be a thriller called Grace Humiston and the Vanishing.  It’s a novel based on a actual murder investigation in New York City in 1917.

Grace Humiston

The second “ebook” will in fact be a long nonfiction article, tentatively titled The Crime Lawyer, which will tell the true story of Humiston and her exploits.  Also, I’m involved in a project with the executor and the agent of the late hardboiled writer Dan J. Marlowe. We’re going to publish several of Marlowe’s novels as ebooks.

At some point, I will actually publish the biography of Marlowe that I’ve been working on for several years.  So stay tuned.

If you have occasion to scan an old paperback (or hardback) into a digital file for publishing it as an ebook, proof the resulting copy with an eagle eye.  I spent a week proofing Dan J. Marlowe’s The Vengeance Man, first published in 1966, and I must have turned up 40 or 50 instances of mistakes the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software made in scanning the book.  The process works, but it is labor-intensive. Eventually we’ll get to Marlowe’s novel The Fatal Frails, first published in 1960.  We’ll proof it, and it will come out looking very nice, I’m sure, but it will be hard to capture the flavor of the original cover.