WESTERN BOOKS THEN AND NOW

THE STATE OF WESTERN HISTORY AND FICTION PUBLISHING IN 2024 IS ONE OF GRIT AND DETERMINATION.

- STUART ROSEBROOK

In 2013, I received a call from my friend Allen Barra who said there was an opportunity at True West: Western Books editor. I thanked him and called Executive Editor Bob Boze Bell. The rest is history and ever since I have had the pleasure of managing the Western Books department for True West magazine. Pre-COVID, I was receiving well over 600 books a year for review. Fiction, nonfiction, biography, environmental, autobiography, military, essay, reprints, self-published, ancient, natural, cultural, you name the topic, I was receiving hard copy books, advanced reader copies, even bound final drafts for review. Authors and publicists have reached out to me at every one of my emails, social media accounts and phone numbers. What a wild ride it has been. And while I have stepped aside as the editor of True West, with my new position as executive director of Sharlot Hall Museum in Prescott, Arizona, I will continue as books and travel editor, with the new title of editor-at-large.

This past October, I was one of three keynote speakers at the Ozark Creative Writers Conference in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. The wonderful gathering of authors, like the annual Western Writers Conference I attended in Tulsa, Oklahoma, earlier in the year in June, was affirming, promising and hopeful.

Thanks to the success of Yellowstone and Dark Winds, below, a slew of new Western novels-Old, Traditional and Modern, have been published utilizing the basic themes and production to achieve almost a cottage industry around the themes popularized on television.