Bits & Bytes: The many faces of William

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Devon here. You might remember that our Bits & Bytes posts are general posts about publishing and technology and other non-technical writing. Today we’ve got a Bits & Bytes post about William Stanek’s various writing pursuits. Enjoy.

William here. So yeah, most people know about my books published using my full name William R. Stanek. I am, arguably, the #1 best-selling technical how-to author in the world and have been for some time. I write all my books to a steady beat of 5 to 7 books a year and normally don’t use contributors or co-authors. That’s how it’s been for most tech books I’ve written for nearly 20 years. There are exceptions of course, but otherwise it’s all me and I rather like it that way.

Books I’ve written and had published this year include:

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Well, I also write independently published books as Robert Stanek and I hope you’ll pick out of few of them for your Christmas shopping list. I won’t promise that you’ll find them to be mind-blowing or life-altering, but I do hope you find them to be pretty good. Book you might want to try:

clip_image008 Stormjammers – the true story I wrote about air warfare in the Persian Gulf War. The book received a very supportive review from The Journal of Electronic Defense.

clip_image009 Keeper Martin’s Tale – a heroic fantasy novel and the first book in the Ruin Mist Chronicles, which spent 26 weeks on the Amazon SciFi Top 50 in 2002.

clip_image010 The Kingdoms and the Elves of the Reaches – a version of Ruin Mist Chronicles for kids and teens that the YA library staff at VOYA seemed to like a lot and was a Top 50 Fiction Best-seller and one of the Top 100 all-time best-sellers at Audible in 2005.

clip_image011clip_image012clip_image013clip_image014 Bugville Critters – a children’s picture book series that was selected as an audio “pick” by Parenting Magazine

This is important to me because more than a few not-so-nice folks who’d prefer that I not compete against them or their favorite authors have stirred up some pretty deep muck about these books for a lot of years. The message at the heart of all this noise is that I’m doing evil things to sell my books. The simple truth is that it’s easy to make up lies about people and post them all over the Internet. Do it enough times and people start to believe the lies—and some people spread lies just to be hateful. The harder truth is that my fiction books endure because they are pretty good and most readers like them. My works aren’t mind-blowing or life-altering, but they are at the least entertaining and fun. And entertainment/fun is what most writing should be about.

My latest releases for fiction is Battle for Ruin Mist: The Roleplaying Game…

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If you like what you read and I hope you do, I hope you’ll help spread the positive word about these books. There’s a place in the market for big, small, and indie. These books are small and indie, and they deserve a place and a fair chance.

Thank you,

Happy Holidays,

William Stanek