New Spanish edition released of author John Ronner’s longtime best-seller on the subject of angels

MURFREESBORO -- More than 50,000 copies of Murfreesboro author John Ronner’s book Know Your Angels: The Angel Almanac are in print in English and 48,000-plus in Japanese. Now, these paper editions are joined by a new Spanish language e-book edition downloadable to Amazon’s Kindle readers, smart phones and other devices (La Enciclopedia de los Ángeles).

“As the book market in Latin America continues to explode, I wanted to aim for new readers in that direction,” said Ronner, whose first book, Do You Have a Guardian Angel?, appeared in 1985.

Currently, Ronner has more than 140,000 copies of his books in print in English, Japanese and Portuguese, but is now converting to digital publishing.

“The traditional publishing model is far less appealing to writers, in my opinion,” Ronner said. “Publishing e-books eliminates the many middlemen of traditional publishing and enables experienced writers to go directly to their readers without spending months or years coaxing publishing houses to issue them contracts. J. K. Rowling recently announced that she will be self-publishing Harry Potter e-books. Meanwhile, thriller writer Barry Eisler has turned down a $500,000 advance from a traditional publisher so that he can independently publish his next two books.

“Of course, some things don’t change. You still need strong content and to get the word out to your readers. The digital wave notwithstanding, books still only very rarely sell themselves,” Ronner said.

Know Your Angels, and its Spanish edition, list biographies of 100 prominent angels drawn from scripture, legend, folklore and mythology. There are also many entries for angel-related topics like the legendary war in heaven, the different opinions about how angels fell, the seven heavens, and Moses’s visit to heaven, among many other topics.

Ronner spent three years’ researching the original English edition.