Four Book Awards This Year for LaPuerta Author Jones

With the announcement by the Eric Hoffer Book Awards on May 18, LaPuerta Books and Media author Gerald Everett Jones garners two more awards. His nonfiction title "How to Lie with Charts" is a Finalist in Business, and his novel "Preacher Finds a Corpse" is Finalist in Mystery/Crime. For the Evan Wycliff amateur-sleuth mystery, this is the second book award this year, being among the Distinguished Favorites announced by the Independent Press Awards on May 5. In that same competition, Jones also won a Distinguished Favorites recognition for his literary fiction "Clifford's Spiral."

Jones quips, "Well, my head is spinning. When the first awards came out, I remarked facetiously that winning two Independent Press Awards was not quite a hat trick. So just to prove the gods have a sense of humor, the Eric Hoffer committee generously bestowed two more. I'm particularly jazzed about 'Preacher Finds a Corpse' being judged worthy in separate competitions. That's the first in the Evan Wycliff series, and I'm still puzzling through the final plot twists in the second one.

That's 'Preacher Fakes a Miracle,' and I hope to have it ready this summer."

In the first mystery, Evan Wycliff, a lapsed divinity student who is fascinated by astrophysics, finds his best friend shot dead in a cornfield. It looks like suicide. Having returned to his farm roots near Lake of the Ozarks, Evan works as a skip tracer for the local car dealer. He learns his friend was involved in a dispute over farmland ownership that goes back two centuries - complicated now by plans to make an old weapons facility a tourist attraction. In the second installment, Evan counsels a teenage boy with schizophrenia who has been accused of rape.

First published in 1995 by Sybex, "How to Lie with Charts" has become core content for students of data visualization. Jones covers the principles of persuasive and undistorted visual communication. Over the years, the book has been adopted as supplementary courseware in college-level business math and marketing curriculums. The recently released fourth edition recognized in the Eric Hoffer announcement has new chapters on how distortions can become fake news and how Big Data can be bent to craft misleading messages.

According to the award committee: "The Eric Hoffer Book Award was founded at the start of the 21st century (with permission from the Eric Hoffer Estate) to honor freethinking writers and independent books of exceptional merit. The commercial environment for today's writers has all but crushed the circulation of ideas. It seems strange that in the Information Age, many books are blocked from wider circulation, and powerful writing is barred from publication or buried alive on the Internet. Furthermore, many of the top literary prizes will not consider independent books, choosing instead to become the marketing arms of large presses."
LaPuerta Books and Media is a small-press imprint of La Puerta Productions, which also produces the GetPublished! Radio show, providing advice and support to indie authors and publishers.

Jones holds a Bachelor of Arts with Honors from the College of Letters, Wesleyan University. He is the author of nine novels. His previous works include a series of three satiric Rollo Hemphill misadventures, the adult melodrama "Christmas Karma," the crime story "Choke Hold," the father-son comedy "Mr. Ballpoint," and the historical thriller "Bonfire of the Vanderbilts." He coauthored the nonfiction memoir "The Light in His Soul: Lessons from My Brother's Schizophrenia" with Rebecca Schaper. He has also written more than 25 nonfiction books on business and technical subjects and is an award-winning screenwriter. He is a member of the Writers Guild of America, Women's National Book Association, Dramatists Guild, and the Independent Writers of Southern California. He is the host of the GetPublished! Radio show (getpublishedradio.com).

Author portrait by Gabriella Muttone Photography, Hollywood
INDEPENDENT PRESS AWARD® is a registered trademark of GabbyBookAwards
Award seal ©) The Eric Hoffer Award