Ken Merrell entrepreneur to novelist.

• Author: Bjorklund, Todd
• Position: People

IN HIS REVIEW OF THE NEW THRILLER The Landlord, Terry Matthews of Book Browser says of new author Ken Merrell, "He can weave a spell with his storytelling talents!" But before becoming a novelist, Utah Valley-based Merrell was a successful, self-employed businessman. And what makes his dramatic change of career especially surprising is that Merrell has dyslexia.

This Utah native went into business for himself at the age of 14, when he convinced a local Provo radio station to sponsor his haunted house in return for a share of the profits. Merrell was an entrepreneur from that day on, developing a series of successful businesses, most recently Cobblecrete International, a urethane stamp manufacturing company, with yearly revenues of $2.5 million and customers around the globe.

Merrell sold Cobblecrete last year to devote himself to writing, surmounting his dyslexia with determination and technology. He first remembers experiencing difficulties with English in the third grade, and recalls that by seventh, it was so bad he became sick before English class. Until recently, he has not known the cause of his difficulties, but he compensated by relying on his superb visual memory, dictation and memorization of new words. But in a moment of frustration in the midst of writing The Landlord, he said to his mother, "I don't know why I am so stupid in the English language, and I can do anything else I want to do!" His mother, a special education teacher, told him that she had suspected he was dyslexic since he was in the third grade.

Although Merrell had always wanted to write, his dyslexia frustrated every attempt. But he says that by the late 1990s, improvements in word processing technology, especially spelling and grammar checkers, finally...