This blood's for you.

• Author: Bailey, David
• Position: Jerry Bledsoe, author of true-to-life murder stories - Company Profile

The state's most famous crime writer tries to make book on a treacherous game of publish or perish.

Jerry Bledsoe, pulls into the driveway of his Randolph County home at 6, after a 10-hour day of autographing books and appearing on Winston-Salem's top-rated AM radio station.

You'd think the state's most famous crime writer would be riding high. After all, his newest book, Blood Games, was released five weeks before an account of the same murder written by Joe McGinniss, who had a best seller in 1983 with Fatal Vision. Time magazine called Bledsoe's Blood Games "livelier, clearer, better reported" than McGinniss' Cruel Doubt. And in a month or so, the made-for-television movie of Blood Games would be out -- again, ahead of the McGinniss version. Not only that, Blood Games, Bledsoe's account of how three N.C. State students were convicted of murdering the stepfather of one of the boys, had that very week beat McGinniss' book to the paperbacks racks -- complete with an embossed cover, as glitzy as it was grisly.

But the former Greensboro News & Record columnist, who at 50 still sports a Beatle haircut, is dragging as he slams the door of his '87 Nissan wagon. A black-tongued chow runs up, wagging her tail and looking for a little affection. Tasha can forget it. Bledsoe is in a dark mood.

He's got a bad cold and has missed the deadline for the first few chapters of the book he's writing about Barbara Stager, a Durham woman whose first and second husbands were found shot in the head in bed. But he can't find time to write because his publishing business, Down Home Press, takes up all his time. Working out of their home, Bledsoe and his wife, Linda, have published 27 books in the past 30 months.

"The last two years have been the most pressurized in my life," he complains. "I try to do the book business in the morning, break for lunch, come back and do the writing business till midnight. But a lot of days, the book business takes till midnight."

Walking toward his office, across the yard from his house, his eye catches some boxes in the back of his pickup truck. It's 19 cartons of Down Home Press titles that came back from bookstores during the day -- books that didn't sell. The Bloodman, as his friends have nicknamed him because of his true-crime books, glowers at the cartons as if he'd like to kill someone.

Bledsoe says he was unprepared for the complexity of business: "Having to deal with the diddly-shit stuff -- it wipes you out," he says. "Then you don't get around to doing the creative things like finding the right books and editing them well and getting them out there."

More distressing, though, are revenues. Bledsoe has poured more than $100,000 of his own money (he won't say exactly how much) into his business. But Down Home's titles, many of them written by friends or journalists he's worked with, have been slow to sell. At last, though, he's breaking even -- if you use Bledsoe's form of accounting.

"I kept putting money in, money in, money in, and I never saw any money coming back. ... But we think for the first time we don't owe anything, and we have money in the bank." Then he adds as an afterthought, "But I've forgotten how many times along the line I've put in $10,000 or $15,000 to carry us over."

You'll hear Jerry Bledsoe say it over and over again: "It takes a fool or a crazy person to go into the book-publishing business."

Then why on earth does he do it? "Because I think it ought to be done," he says. In this age of competing against the five-second sound bite, newspapers have abandoned hard-hitting, in-depth journalism, Bledsoe will tell you. He thinks regional publishing can take up the slack. Besides, he knows what it's like to have written something and have no one to publish it: "You can't publish every good book that goes unpublished, but, damn it, you can publish some of them -- especially if they're by your friends."

Like a kid who finds a $5 bill on the playground and blows it on Fudgsicles for his buddies, Jerry Bledsoe took the royalties he made from his first big hit, Bitter Blood, and started Down Home Press. "It was a dumb thing to do," he says. "If you had any sense, you'd put it in stock."

Bitter Blood was about the serial murders beginning in 1984 of seven people, all related to Greensboro resident Susie Newsom Lynch. Although the hardback sold only about 20,000 copies, the paperback stayed on The New York Times' best-seller list for 26 weeks. Despite Bitter Blood's success...