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Community Corner

Buffalo Grove Author Weaves A Web Of Mystery On The Internet

Leon Shure is spending his retirement writing e-books. His fourth story is in the works.

After he retired, a friend asked Leon Shure what he planned to do with all his time.

“I had a flip answer, ‘Oh, I’m going to write mysteries,’" he recalled. And that’s exactly what this one-time lawyer and former president of the Board has been doing.

But he’s gone about it in a non-traditional way; harnessing the power of the Internet, social media and the burgeoning self-publishing industry, this Buffalo Grove resident has turned out three e-books and has a fourth one on the way.

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“I am very pleased with it,” Shure said. “I make contact with the readers in a different kind of way.”

Shure’s first book, “Conversationstoppers: Puns, Non Sequiturs, Impossible Scenarios” is a book of puns; his others are mysteries, “The Fatal Sisters” and the newest release, “The Baba Yaga, a Dr. Adam Karl Mystery.”

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All are so-called e-books — available primarily as downloads, read on electronic readers like the iPad and Kindle, and marketed by electronic word-of-mouth on blogs, and social media like Twitter and Facebook.

Like many e-book authors, Shure, who turns 64 in August, has used electronic self-publishing to bypass traditional publishing, so there’s no need to sell ideas to publishers or deal with agents.

Shure said he tried traditional publishing, but found it frustrating.

“I got a lot of rejection notices. If I had been 25, I would have kept it up.

“I gave traditional publishing industry its fair chance. And they weren’t overwhelmed.”

So, after 10 books, none of which were snapped up, Shure turned to self-publishing and although he characterizes online sales as “modest,” his books have found readers as far away as Australia and the United Kingdom.

“It’s fun and exciting,” he said, “to think people in Australia are reading my stuff.”

But when it comes to the chances of becoming the next hot author appearing on talk shows and making big bucks, he is realistic.

“It’s just like the movie industry,” he said. “The top people get a million dollars and then there’s the rest of us.”

Before he turned to writing, Shure spent his working years as a lawyer with the federal government, hearing disability cases filed by railroad workers.

“I’ve always been a big reader,” he says. “The writing I was doing was so incredibly dull.

“But when I turned 60, I decided I’d try my hand at some of this fiction writing. I just thought I’d like to see if I could do it.”

His first e-book, “Conversationstoppers,” didn’t generate many online sales. Then he dropped the price to zero, sparking more than 2,500 downloads worldwide.

In his most recent book, “The Baba Yaga, a Dr. Adam Karl Mystery,” a young doctor just beginning a neurological practice and suffering from perceptual problems, and his “seeing-eye woman,” Kayko Brasen, help Chicago police get testimony from an autistic boy who is the only witness to his mother’s murder.

The doctor is in part based on the real life, famed neurologist Oliver Sacks, who suffers from prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, which leaves him unable to recognize faces.

Shure said he heard of Sacks and thought “wouldn’t it be interesting” to have a detective with that problem as a central character in a murder mystery.

Pulling characters out of what’s in the news is part of Shure’s creative process.

“Characters just come to you,” he said. “First you think of a plot. You try something and it's bad, so you try something else. Maybe it’s a little bit different then what you anticipated.”

"I always know who has done it. I'm just not always sure how to get there." His current project has a more complex plot, he said. "I've had to make notes to make sure it works out."

He wouldn’t reveal any details about the work, saying only the process takes about three months and the final draft should run about 70,000 words.

With three books published and a fourth on the way, Shure remains realistic about the future.

“I’m not living off this stuff. I’m never going to be self-supporting,” he said. “I know some writers and the ones that are publishing the traditional stuff, they are working awfully hard. I admire that, but it seems like salesmanship is 90 percent of it.

“I’ll just keep writing books until somebody reads them,” he said. “I’ve been productive all my life and its hard in retirement to stop.”

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