A really big piece of hot news. Really. Big.

Over the years I’ve written a fair number of books – over fifty, in fact. Almost all have been published traditionally. And that’s given me an immense back-list. Which, I’m pleased to say, is back.

Coming soon…

I had to say that, didn’t I. You know – back list… back… But I digress.

The hot news is that this list includes eight military-related books, which I wrote between 1998 and 2007 for Reed New Zealand, then New Zealand’s oldest and most prestigious publisher. All but the last were out of print when Penguin acquired Reed in 2007. I already had a publishing list with Penguin, who I also wrote for – but they weren’t interested in reprinting my old Reed titles. So I retrieved the publishing rights over the next few years. Yah – I was busy cancelling contracts with Penguin just as every other writer on the planet was fighting at the door to get such contracts…

Fast-forward to 2015. I was able to get seven of them published on Amazon Kindle – and one, Kiwi Air Power – in print.

Click to buy

And now, three years later? I’m delighted to announce that the last of them, New Zealand’s Military Heroism, is about to be released in new edition. It’s the one I am most proud of because I wrote it to answer why people become military heroes. It’s really about the psychology of how people react in extraordinary situations – military ones, in this case, but it’s a general lesson – set against the changing nature of society through time. It’s also a stand-out because it was released within a day or so of the specific take-over day when Penguin swallowed Reed – and, as far as I can tell, that makes it the very last book Reed published, and this after a century of publishing New Zealand books by such luminaries as Barry Crump, A. H. Reed, and many other well-known Kiwi writers.

But wait, there’s more. You can also use these books as steak knives. No, wait – I got distracted. Actually it’s better than that. All eight are being given new covers for a modern and unified ‘series’ theme. They’re also out at a lower standard price, unless it’s reviewed (who can tell, really – get in quick, I say).

Click to buy…

And get this – they won’t just be on Kindle. They’ll be in print, which means they’ll be available in all good New Zealand bookshops – or via Amazon, internationally. The print side will take a while – probably another twelve to eighteen months to get all eight of them out. But you can already get Kiwi Air Power in print here: https://www.amazon.com/Kiwi-Air-Power-history-Military/dp/0908318111/

I’ll be introducing the new covers on this blog in more detail over the next little while – a short series of posts to give you a bit of background to the concepts behind both the cover themes and the books themselves.

Watch this space.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2018