Brian W. Kelly—393 Books: The Most Published Non-Fiction Author In America($12.95Value)

Description

My writing career has endured since I was in grade school. I showed an interest when the teacher gave me English compositions as in-class exercises. I loved writing from first grade when I was five and teachers encouraged me to continue. When I joined IBM, I was often part of a system proposal team creating large written solutions for businesses such as banks or factories. I would often write as much as 90% of original work in such proposal documents. Shortly after 1981, my long-time best friend, fellow author, and fellow IBMer, Dennis Grimes, and I, decided that we would write a book about the new IBM Personal Computer. We were both Senior Systems Engineers for IBM, We called our new book the Personal Computer Buyers Guide. Ballinger Publishing, a Division of Harper Collins, flew us to Cambridge Massachusetts where their President Mike Connolly, signed us to write the book. Grimes and I kept at it after our success. When Mr. Connolly stepped down, he asked to become our agent. He arranged a six book contract with John Wiley & Sons, another big name publisher we mingled with at the time. We were off to the races. Afterwards, Dennis lost interest in writing but I kept at it. I worked with IBMs most advanced business computer, The Application System/400 (AS/400). I contacted the top AS/400 publisher at the time, Midrange Computing, and they kept me busy for quite a while, writing AS/400-style tech books. When Midrange exited the project, I signed with the next best AS/400 publisher, News/400 who later changed their name to 29th Street Press. I also wrote books for Cardinal Business Media and others before starting my own company called Lets Go Publish! I became one of the most published AS/400 authors in the world with a regular column in a weekly called IT Jungle. Offset Paperback printed all of my paperback books under my imprint Lets Go Publish! What was left of Midrange Computing, as well as 29th Street Press, and the startup ITJungle, marketed and distributed my technical books during this period. Dennis Grimes wrote some pieces in my books to help me out over time. He and I had also been faculty members at Marywood University. The Academic Dean was s impressed with our book publishing prowess so they hired us both as pro rata (half-time) faculty members. In other words, we split one faculty position. Another IBM Senior Systems Engineer, Paul Harkins, told me about a new outlet he found for his programming books. The company’ s name was CreateSpace. Paul said that they did it all: “You just have to write the books and they do all the rest.” He was right. I did not know at the time that CreateSpace had been acquired by Amazon and then they changed the company name to Amazon KDP. Since CreateSpace, I have been with Amazon and other publishers for more than twenty years. My career includes the writing and publishing of three hundred seventy-eight paperback titles and over two-hundred eBooks with Amazon. This book focuses on the paperback titles and describes each of my books inside.