Keith Ferrell's 'Decoded' NYTimes Bestseller

Keith Ferrell: His first NYTimes Bestseller

My friend Keith Ferrell is bouncing off the walls of his Franklin County farmhouse today because a book he co-wrote with Brad Meltzer, History Decoded, will be No. 10 on the New York Times bestseller list this coming Sunday. It was 13 last week. The book features 10 historical mysteries that come from the History Channel show "Brad Meltzer's Decoded."

Meltzer is a well-known writer of fiction, but the better writer in History Decoded is Keith, whose prose is always above the crowd. Keith says he turned in 100,000 words, "of which about 70,000 were kept."

Keith has written a million words in a year (that's the equivalent of about 10 books) on several occasions and has another book waiting in the wings for release. He said Decoded took about five weeks or so to write. That's Mickey Spillane speed.

He has written 18 or so books. It's hard to pin that number down specifically because he has several that were ghost-written (including one posthumous Harold Robbins book, which to my mind was better than Robbins' work).

Keith will be one of the teachers at the 2014 (Jan. 24-25) Roanoke Regional Writers Conference, his fourth appearance, as I recall. He has been an opening-night speaker. I was his editor with two publications--the Blue Ridge Business Journal and FRONT magazine--and he was editor of Omni Magazine, probably the best of all science mags.