This does not count Kindle subscribers who get the books for free. But Chris has another measure to include — page counts are up to 16 million between last year and the present.

With a couple of clicks, his novels go straight to Amazon’s general store. Most of them sell for 99 cents apiece. Amazon has bought the rights to three and bumped the price to $3.99. Chris gets about a third of the dollar sales and half of the $3.99 ones.

Not bad when you do the math. By the end of this year, Chris will have earned north of six figures.

***

Chris did not set out to write for money. He did not write for attention.

If so, he might have chosen a different genre than the Western, which some say is going the way of the horse and buggy.

Instead, Chris wrote to keep his mind busy and his chin up.

The terminal cancer he’d been diagnosed with back in 1995 had not killed him after all. But the “cure” — 10 weeks of daily radiation treatment — had taken its toll in recent years.

His neck muscles twisted and hardened, taking away his ability to spit, swallow, eat or talk clearly. He lost his teeth and his body’s natural ability to regulate blood pressure.