Michael D. Jenkins, author of the "Starting and Operating a Business in (state)" book (now e-book) series for all 50 states, has a widely varied business and legal background, which made him an obvious choice to author this kind of book series. He grew up on a rice farm in the Cajun country of southwest Louisiana, and like his father and all of his 5 siblings, is a graduate of Louisiana State University, with a B.A. in Government, where he accumulated numerous academic honors and intramural sports trophies. After college, he earned his J.D. (law) degree from Harvard Law School in 1969. NOTE: All of the print editions of this series have long been out of print, since 1996 or 1997. However, current (updated) editions for each state are available on Amazon as Kindle e-books.However, being far more interested in business and finance than law, and having spent much of his time at Harvard across the Charles River at the Business School, he turned down lucrative law firm offers and initially went to work after law school as an economics and management consultant with a leading national consulting firm, Economics Research Associates, in Los Angeles and later in their Washington, D.C. area office.There he did all types of economic feasibility studies for clients that ranged from a multi-year diversification strategy for Conoco, hotel feasibility studies in downtown Philadelphia, and a long-range downtown development study in Houston, to performing the site selection study for the Nixon Presidential Library in Orange County, California (working with several members of Nixon's inner circle who later became involved in Watergate and, thereafter, making license plates).After several years, and after taking accounting studies at night at UCLA, he became a CPA and Tax Supervisor with Peat, Marwick & Mitchell in Los Angeles, the world's largest CPA firm at the time, where he was ranked by the company as their #1 senior tax specialist in the large global firm the year before he left. He then finally returned to the law, as a tax attorney with the large San Francisco and Silicon Valley law firm of Cooley, Godward, et al, where he practiced tax, labor, and pension law for several years. There he handled matters such as billion-dollar mergers and large, complex corporate pension and labor issues, but also became the law firm's small business and start-ups specialist. After several years, he got an offer he could not refuse, and returned to CPA practice, quickly becoming a tax partner in Kimbell, McKenna & Von Kaschitz, a large regional (Bay Area) CPA firm, where he headed the firm's in-house tax training, as well as becoming the featured speaker on taxes at large seminars for lawyers and business people in the area, sponsored by his firm.His writing career began almost by accident. One day in 1980, his next door neighbor in Alameda, California, who had recently started a small business publishing firm in Silicon Valley, came over to talk and pointed out what a difficult time he had had dealing with all the various state and federal agencies in California, just to start his small business with a handful of employees. He pointed out that Jenkins had the perfect background to write a tax and legal guidebook, and that such a book, in plain, easy-to-understand English, was badly needed to help guide people through the thicket of federal and California taxes and business regulations. After very little arm-twisting, Jenkins agreed that it sounded like a good idea, and took a 3-month sabbatical from his CPA firm to research and write the book, which he felt would be a nice adjunct to his CPA practice. However, and quite unexpectedly, "Starting and Operating a Business in California" almost immediately became a hit, after he appeared on several major San Francisco and southern California radio shows to discuss (tout) the book, which had no real competition at the time. (Over the 17 years the California edition was in print, it alone sold over 265,000 copies in the state.)He soon wrote similar titles for a few other states, and rounded up old law school and college buddies, who were also attorneys, to co-author similar editions with him for their states, such as Florida. Once Costco and the Price Club began selling his books in large numbers in their warehouse stores, bookstores soon followed, and the publisher soon had to build his own printing plant to keep up with demand, since most of the books were being sold in a messy 3-ring binder kit format with a number of state and federal tax and business registration forms and pre-printed postcards included, and were quite labor-intensive to produce. Before long, Jenkins enlisted the "Big 8" CPA firm of Ernst & Young as his co-authors (to provide local authors in each state to contribute the state information) in approximately 40 states, and by 1986 the series had been extended to all 50 states and D.C., and Jenkins retired from law and CPA practice to devote full time to writing and promoting the book series (plus writing software). Book sales grew steadily until 1997, with over a million copies of the $30 books sold, when his publisher overextended his firm into publishing many other business books (that didn't sell) and ceased publication of the series in 1998, following some other financial misfortunes. Another publisher picked up the series in 2000 and published a single (national) print version with all 50 state chapters included on a CD-ROM, until 2005, but was largely unsuccessful in getting it into bookstores or Costco.Since 2005, after re-acquiring the book rights, Jenkins has been publishing the entire series as an accompaniment to his "Small Business Advisor" Windows software, in electronic (HTML) format. (Jenkins is also a programmer of Windows software.) Since 2011, the entire series has also been available as Kindle e-books for each state and D.C. Each book in the series covers federal and state taxes and business laws that are of primary importance to most small businesses, as well as providing a wealth of practical advice, information and learning acquired over a lifetime career of advising small businesses. Each of the state editions is approximately 500 pages long and both the federal and state information in each is updated annually. The Kindle editions are available for $9.99 each on Amazon.com.After buying his first PC in 1983, Jenkins quickly learned DOS programming, which he found to be highly addictive, and by 1986, as a hobby, had published a uniquely sophisticated and entertaining corporate finance/stock market game and simulation, "Wall Street Raider." After having it published by his book publisher until 1990, he started Ronin Software that year and has self-published and constantly improved on the program ever since, switching over to a Windows version in 2001. Over the years, he has added numerous other types of investments to the game, including put and call options, commodity futures trading, government bonds, junk bonds, and interest rate swaps (derivatives), as well as allowing players to invest in or take over and manage any of the 1600 companies that make up the simulation, all operating within a highly realistic econometric model."Sometimes hobbies become obsessions, and I never seem to run out of new wrinkles and ghoulish financial scenarios to add to this simulation, as well as inventing new ways to make it ever more realistic and difficult to win at, just like the real financial world," Jenkins says, although he earns little more than "beer money" from his small but fanatical following of fans of the game, in over 90 countries at last count.The author has also been writing a series of humorous short stories over the last 20 years, chronicling the crazy last two decades of the 20th century, and finally has published a collection of these stories as a Kindle e-book, titled "The Gonzo Chronicles." He is currently working on another collection of short stories called "Fear & Loathing in Hawaii," which he claims should cure anyone from ever wanting to live in Hawaii, as he did for two years.Living in the beautiful red rock country of southern Utah, not far from Zion Canyon, Jenkins loves the clean air, friendly people, and desert climate of Utah, and enjoys looking out his office window at the soaring 1200-foot red cliffs nearby. He has spent much of spare time in the last few decades, when not on a mountain bike, exploring Indian ruins throughout the Southwest and doing whitewater rafting on rivers from Oregon to Taos and the Grand Canyon. He considers himself lucky to be alive after a terrifying trip through Cataract Canyon during near-record high water back in the 1990's, the inspiration for one of his satirical short stories, "Dead Men Don't Float."While he loves the desert Southwest, Jenkins still makes regular pilgrimages back to his home state of Lousiana, claiming that "I can survive without Cajun cooking only for so long...."