Author and Publisher
I'm currently working on a non-fiction book called Fact or Fiction, which consists of sets of true-or-false questions with detailed answers, including references so readers can confirm, and also follow up for more information. Most books of this type simply give the answer as true or false, or perhaps offer a short explanation. However, the context is often key, and missing. The book should be published by the end of September, through Amazon.
Until then, my most recent success with writing is an eight-page article in Pilot magazine, July 2025, called A Better Way to Fly? You can read it here, by kind permission of the publishers.
I began writing seriously when I was commissioned to write a student text book, Aircraft Structures and Systems, which was published by Longman Higher Education (now Pearsons) in 1996. A few years later, it was dropped from their catalogue. A colleague was in the same position, and we obtained the rights and formed a publishing company, MechAero Publishing, to keep them in print. We were quite successful, selling several thousand copies. The company closed in 2020. I published several other books through that imprint, including POW: Diary of a Prisoner of War and Study Skills Made Easy.
Recently, I began publishing again for family and friends, starting with a couple of family books with no commercial intent. A couple of friends from Verulam Writers wanted to self-publish, so I typeset their books for them using InDesign, a full-on commercial publishign program, and they are now on Amazon in paperback and Kindle formats: Achilles the Changeling by Judith Foster and By the River by Clare Lehovsky. My most recent publishing effort is Shorts for All Seasons by Wendy Turner.
I have written a novel, but to be honest it's not very good, and I have no plans to publish it.
I worked with the Chairman of Verulam Writers to give a talk, How to Self-Publish, in 2023, and the companion guide to that talk is available from the VW website.
Several of the books I've published can be seen in the banner above.
