Mike currently has eight self-published books in print, all of which are sold on Amazon. They have all garnered 4.5 to 5 star reviews on Amazon. He has made sample chapters of each of his books available to read on this website.
Mike and his wife, Marianne, live near Wicomico Church on Virginia's Northern Neck close to the Chesapeake Bay. Mike's primary literary interests are largely aviation related, and most of his published work revolves around that theme. He began skydiving in 1962, and he became a pilot in 1967. He currently holds a Commercial Pilot's license with approximately 6,000 hours of Pilot-in-Command time in a wide range of aircraft. For nearly twenty years, he worked as a first jump instructor and jump pilot.
He just released, See You in the Black, The United States Army Parachute Team, The Golden Knights, which is the product of a two year long research and writing project that chronicles the Team's history and current day operations. The book and sample chapters are featured on the "Published Books" page of this website.
Literary Background
Mike’s first commercially published book was acquired in 1984 by Prentice-Hall, a division of Simon and Schuster, and a publisher of trade books written by authors such as Norman Vincent Peale. The book, a mass market title, was Twelve Steps to Finding a Job. The book was based on Mike’s successful jobseeker’s workshops which he conducted for the Virginia Employment Commission under contract where he coached the unemployed of the time helping them to improve their job search skills. The national unemployment rate then had been running in the 7 to 8 percent range, and Mike was in high demand as both a motivational speaker and job search workshop leader. The book was based on his own experiences as a salesman and those of the jobseekers who attended his workshops. He would lead those workshops twice a month for over eight years.
To publicize his first book, Mike raised over $110,000 through private investors to finance three separate, back-to-back, national book publicity tours over the course of the summer and fall of 1984. The tours encompassed all of the major U.S. markets and involved repeated visits with over 300 major media outlets including radio, television and newspapers. His knowledge of book promotion and publicity is extensive.
Amelia Earhart, Random House Publishing and Robert Loomis
Also, in 1984, Mike was contacted by aviation historian and author Jeffrey Ethell of Front Royal, Virginia, and was asked to act as a ghostwriter. Ethell, a Smithsonian Fellow and author of many specialized, technical books about various World War II aircraft and military air forces around the globe, had previously contracted with Random House Publishers to provide a manuscript regarding the disappearance of Amelia Earhart over the Pacific Ocean in 1937.
At the time Ethell enlisted Mike, he and Vincent V. Loomis, who acted as a co-author and technical advisor to Ethell, had been paid a $10,000 advance by Random House and given a 12 month deadline to provide an acceptable finished manuscript for publication as a mass market book about Earhart’s flight and possible fate. By the time that Ethell reached out to Mike, he and his co-author were 14 months into the project having had their manuscript rejected by Random House editors five times due to the stiff and dry nature of the writing. Renowned Random House Senior Editor, Robert Loomis, was Ethell’s editor leading the project, and he was pushing Ethell to rewrite the manuscript and “…make it come alive.”
Ethell was desperate to finish the project as Random House was hinting that they would void the contract and demand the advance be repaid in full. The problem was that Ethell, with a large family to feed and a new home under construction, had spent the money and was in no position to pay it back. He needed a creative writer to massage the manuscript. Ethell and Mike had been communicating with one another during the previous year, and a friendship between them had developed. Ethell had read some of Mike’s short fiction and was impressed by it.
So, in the midst of Mike’s book tours in 1984, Ethell convinced Mike to revise and rewrite the Earhart manuscript in a last-ditch attempt to keep Random House from pulling the plug on the project. Mike took the manuscript with him on the road while conducting his book tours. Between interviews, cross-country flights, and working in his hotel rooms at night, Mike completely rewrote the manuscript using his skills to enhance the imagery, more clearly define the participants in the story and bring them off of the page with better dialogue and improved character descriptions as he boosted the text pacing. His goal, beyond helping Ethell, was to do what Loomis wanted, “…make it come alive.”
Random House accepted Mike’s finished manuscript on the first pass and the book was published in 1984, and titled Amelia Earhart: The Final Story. It was a 159 page, first-edition hardcover, and sales demanded a second edition printing which was accomplished in 1985.
Robert Loomis, Senior Editor, Random House Publishing
Mike’s relationship and collaborations with Ethell would continue until Ethell’s death while piloting a restored airplane at Tillamook, Washington in 1997. However, as a result of the rescue of the Earhart project, Robert Loomis at Random House, had taken Mike under his wing having already brought him to New York City to select the historical photos for the Earhart book, and to advise him regarding the potential promotion and publicity avenues for the book’s release. Like Mike and Ethell, Loomis was a pilot himself. Later, Random House and Ethell would go on to ask Mike to do some of the promotional tours for the Earhart book.
This was Mike’s first major step into the larger literary world, and would advance, in earnest, his development and experience both as a writer and later, as a publisher. Having Loomis as a mentor created a major shift in Mike’s aims as a writer. It was an anomaly for a new, unheard of writer such as Mike, to have Loomis’s important ear. As time went on, Loomis would immediately read and comment on any book proposal that Mike forwarded to him. Loomis unfortunately passed in 2020 as a result of a fall at his residence.
Having Loomis’s as an editor was a major milestone in Mike’s development as a writer. Many of Loomis's authors had worked with him for decades, including Maya Angelou, who wrote 31 books under his editorship, beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. His authors' loyalty to him, and his to them was legendary. Loomis represented "the classic mold of the editor" and according to Random House, he "embodied the ideal of an old-fashioned editor - understated, but uncanny, polite, but persistent.” As Angelou had said, “Loomis knows what I hope to achieve in all my work. I don't know anybody as fierce, simply fierce, but he's as tender as he's tough." He was well known as a mentor to editors and writers in all areas of the publishing industry.
Other notable authors who had been edited by Loomis included Calvin Trillin, Edmund Morris , who wrote Dutch, the controversial biography of President Ronald Reagan, Shelby Foote, Jonathan Harr, and Jim Lehrer. He edited the Vietnam War epic, A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and in 1998, the novel he edited for Pete Dexter, Paris Trout, earned the National Book Award, as "an unprecedented feat in editing."
Later, Mike’s literary expertise would take another significant step forward.
For years, he had sought to meet and get to know the literary agent and book developer, Eleanor Friede. She had been the acquisitions editor at MacMillian Publishing who, in 1970, had taken a chance and pushed to have pilot-writer Richard Bach’s allegorical novella, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, published after 26 other publishers had previously rejected the book. In the halls of MacMillian, Friede’s efforts to have the book published were known as “Friede’s Folly,” but she persisted.
The book was a sleeper hit. The first edition printing in 1970 was only 3,000 copies, and it would take two years before reaching number one on the New York Times Bestseller List. Not a single magazine or newspaper, including The New York Times Book Review, so much as mentioned the book when it first came out. The Times reported in 1972 that MacMillan had failed to secure any advance publicity for Bach, but he personally took out two very small ads in The New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly. The first printing sold out by the end of 1970, and in 1971 an additional 140,000 copies were printed. Mostly a word-of-mouth phenomenon, it appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List on April 20, 1972, where it remained for 37 weeks; and by July of 1972, it had 440,000 copies in print. Reader's Digest published a condensed version. In 1972, and in 1973, the book topped the Publishers Weekly list of best selling novels in the United States.
Mike’s desire to meet and befriend Friede was based on more than just her success with Bach’s book. Friede was publishing royalty in New York literary circles. Her late husband, Donald Friede, alongside his partner Pascal Covici, had published four of John Steinbeck's books including, Of Mice and Men. Eleanor’s list of publishing friends, clients, and insiders included luminaries such as Truman Capote, the famous American novelist, playwright and screenwriter.
In 1974, Friede received her own imprint at Delacorte Press. In the early 1980’s, she launched Eleanor Friede Books, a literary agency. She loved flying and had a propensity to take on and mentor writers who were pilots. Friede was also a pilot, even owning a small, one plane charter operation for a short time that shuttled her Long Island neighbors who worked in New York City to-and-from LaGuardia Airport daily. Bach had written about that in one of his books, A Gift of Wings.
Shortly after opening her agency, she sold her home in the Hamptons, and moved to the more peaceful mountains of Virginia. By fluke, Mike discovered that she had relocated near him, and taking a long-shot chance that she would respond, he wrote her a letter expressing his admiration for her work, especially where it concerned Richard Bach’s other books having to do with aviation.
Mike’s letter struck a chord with Friede, and she responded by inviting him to her home for coffee. That began a fruitful friendship between the two. Initially, Mike’s primary reason to befriend Friede was that he hoped that she would read his work and offer to represent him. It was the time of fax machines, not emails. Before long, there began a flurry of back-and-forth faxes between the two. Mike would send her his short stories, and she would read and critique them.
One morning a few weeks after Mike had sent her three more of his short stories, he received a glowing fax from Friede wherein she told him that she had read those stories. And what had impressed her most was that his characters had come alive and walked off of the page. She then went on in the fax to recount a memory of a time, sitting by her pool at her home in the Hamptons, when she had struggled to like a book manuscript written by a potential client. As she read the manuscript, her friend Truman Capote dropped by unannounced, as he often did, and took a seat next to her.
She said to him, “Truman, why can’t I like this writer’s work? It is technically perfect, but dead. The characters have no life.” Capote responded curtly, “A writer’s ability to give characters life is a gift, it can’t be taught.”
Friede closed the fax to Mike that early morning with these words, “Your stories move beautifully. They have real characters who live, walk around and breathe instead of lying, even eloquently, flat on the page forever. You know pace and how to do it. Your stories are page turners."