Will C. Knot Book/Books From Avalon

In thecolumn to the right, I hope you will notice the cover picture of "The Stranger From The Valley" due out soon from iuniverse. It is in its final convulsions and should be ejected shortly to land in the middle of the public domain for voracious consumption.

I'm in the middle of reading "The Return of Zach Stuart", by Will C. Knot, published July 1980 by Berkley Books, and am finding it to be an exciting story. It's the story of Zach Stuart who is seeking revenge for his mother, who was terribly beaten by her husband, Dudley Stuart, and left in front of a whorehouse, pregnant. She later dies, but Zach is the offspring. Some twenty odd years later he sets out to take revenge, and the story becomes brutal and full of action between father and son.

I tried looking up Mr. Knot on the internet, but found nothing on him, but my time was limited and put it aside. He has another book by Berkley listed on the previous books page, "Red Skies Over Wyoming."  I'll be looking forward to diving into it if I can find it.

Upcoming from Avalon Books is the western, "The Hidden Truth" by Michael Senuta, and one of the latest releases is "Wild Card" by Loretta Jackson and Vickie Britton. Reading an excerpt from "Wild Card" from the Avalon site, it sounded like something I wouldn't mind reading. All three authors have more than one book published by Avalon. The catalog listing shows well over a hundred western titles available with Kent Conwell, Johnny Boggs, Clifford Blair among the most prolific of the authors.

I think I will compare their catalog with some of the other publishers just for kicks, that is, the ones I can find on the net. Here goes:

The first one I checked was Berkley Books, which came up as Penguin Books (US), and it had over 800 westerns available to buy.

Dorchester Publishing showed on their New Releases, eight books, including "Acres of Unrest" by Max Brand, and "Zane Grey's Lassiter: Brother Gun" by Jack Slade. They listed nine books on their Sale section, and said there were hundreds available.

Kensington showed nine pages of westerns, ten per page cover shots, with William W. Johnstone being the primary author.

I checked five or six other companies listed as Western publishers, but came up empty handed. Anyway there seems to be plenty of western novels available for purchase, and this doesn't count e-books. We just need to drum up enough interest in them for people to read them.