Novels
Military Orders is the third in the Military Orders series. Read more here.
The Maria Kannon is the second in the Military Orders series. Read more here.
In the Middle Ages, military orders like the Templars defended Christians and fought for justice. Now, in a new series of novels, a church has established a clandestine new military order, to fight for today's persecuted Christians. Brother Half Angel is the initial novel in the Military Orders series. Available as an ebook. Read more here.
Hot Rock Dreaming, published in 2010, is the second in the Johnny Ravine private eye series. You can read more about it here. (And don’t you think Ark House Press have done a superb job with the cover design?) A finalist in the 2011 Australian Christian Book of the Year awards.
Published in 2009, Prophets and Loss is the first in a planned series of thrillers starring private detective Johnny Ravine. You can read more about it here.
Spirituality
I wrote this to tell the story of my journey to Christianity, via Zen Buddhism, although the bulk of the book contains my views on culture and spirituality in Australia. Unfortunately, the world wasn’t crying out to hear those views, and the book sold poorly. Published in 1999, it is now out of print. You can read it online here.
Zen Guide, published in 1985, was my first book. I was living in Japan, working as a journalist, and keen to write books. I approached the esteemed local publishing house of John Weatherhill with various suggestions, and they liked my proposal of a guidebook for the many, many Westerners arriving in Japan to study and practise Zen Buddhism. I wrote it together with Professor John Stevens, one of the West’s leading Buddhist scholars, and, in my humble opinion, it remains an excellent book. It is concise, but contains a huge amount of information. John is not just an academic, but also a Zen practitioner - and a first-rate writer - and he contributed some excellent data on Buddhist history, doctrine and practice. I travelled around Japan to research the numerous listings of temples and Zen centres that welcomed Westerners. We also included information on temples that provided hotel-type accommodation, and others that offered Buddhist cuisine to the public. And though it is just a small paperback, John Weatherhill typically did a great job in design. The book is of course long out of print (and also now somewhat out-of-date).
Business and Finance
Top Stocks 2012 is out. It is also available for download in various e-book formats. The Australian Investors Association says: "This is a book for investors interested in the fundamentals of companies who approach investing as buying a small part of a business. The whole package is straightforward and eminently sensible and good value at $29.95."
Top Stocks 2011 came out in October 2010. It will be interesting to see how it sells. Sales tend to track the equity markets, so with the local market looking not too bad, it could be that the book does reasonably well. Here’s what WA Today says: The 2011 volume is the seventeenth in the series that might never change, but still gets better with age...All in all, as always, a great read.
The new edition of Top Stocks was published in October 2009. When I started writing it I doubted that I would find enough companies to make a book. In the event, using exactly the same criteria as the previous year, 92 stocks qualified, a tribute to the strength of Australian companies.
Top Stocks is intended as an independent, objective listing of leading stocks in Australia. They are selected using very strict criteria - each stock must have been listed for five years, in profit for five years and paying a dividend for five years, it must attain a certain level of profitability and its debt should be modest. The result is that typically only about 100 companies make it into the book each year, chosen from the 500 largest stocks in Australia. I got the idea for such a book when I lived in Japan, and saw several similar publications. The first edition came out in 1995, and it is now an annual publication, issued as soon as possible after companies have released their results for the financial year ending in June. It has become a highly popular book, with sales of more than 20,000 copies for several editions (although a sharp decline for sales of Top Stocks 2009, as markets crashed). Altogether, the book has sold around 120,000 copies across all editions.
I never much liked the title (it was my publisher’s idea). I once phoned a very prominent stockbroker for some information, and introduced myself as Martin Roth, author of How the Stock Market Really Works. “Tell me, tell me,” he replied. But it became a popular book, and over four editions, from 1996 to 2001, it sold about 25,000 copies.
How Investing in Commercial Property Really Works was first published in 2003, with the title intended to leverage off the success of How the Stock Market Really Works. My co-author, commercial property guru and writer Chris Lang, gives commercial property guidance at his blog, and you can also buy the book there.
Published in 2005, this was a one-off attempt to capitalise on the success of Top Stocks.
It seemed a good idea at the time, but this book never sold well. Published in 2002.
This book was planned as a new annual publication, covering the top 100 stocks by market capitalisation. Unfortunately, the first (and only) edition was published in 2000 at the height of the dot.com boom, and it included stocks such as Austar United Communications, Davnet, ecorp, PowerTel and Solution 6, all amazingly among Australia’s 100 largest companies, none making a profit (except for Solution 6, which was on a price-earnings ratio of 124) and most shortly to vanish.
The Internet for Investors, published in 1996, was one of the first books anywhere in the world to explore and explain the new but fast-growing phenomenon of online investing. I updated it two years later as The Internet for Investing and Personal Finance. I thought this might become a regular publication, like Top Stocks, but relatively modest sales precluded that.
Analysing Company Accounts - a lay person’s guide to reading a company’s profit and loss statement and balance sheet - was my first book after our family came to live in Australia. I saw a gap in the market for such a title and phoned Geoff Wright of Wrightbooks with a proposal. He accepted immediately, and even paid me a small advance. Geoff was my publisher until he sold his business to John Wiley in 2001, and over the years I came greatly to like and respect him. He is now retired, but we still stay in touch. The first edition, published in 1995, sold just 2,500 copies, but that was sufficient back then to make it one of the year’s top-selling finance books.
This concise guide to the Japanese stock market was one of the first of its kind in English. It was conservatively written, but my publisher unwisely titled it Making Money in Japanese Stocks. With astute timing, it appeared in bookstores in late 1989, right before the Tokyo share bubble burst and the market entered a tumultuous dive, from which it has never recovered. I had told my editor that I didn’t like her planned back-cover blurb, but she just smiled and said something to the effect that, “You know us publishers. We always go a bit over the top. That’s publishing.” I wish I had been more insistent. At least one international financial journal ridiculed the book for that blurb, which read, in part: “The Tokyo Stock Exchange is hot ….Not only is [it] surging, its quick recovery from the October 1987 crash showed it to be one of the world’s safest markets….Experts predict that the boom will continue until well into the 1990s.”