Simon Whaley

ALLi Author Member

Simon Whaley lives in rural Shropshire, having escaped from Greater London in the late 1990s. His first published piece was a word search puzzle, aged 17, and he’s since written over 825 articles in publications as varied as BBC Countryfile, Country Walking, Cheshire Life, SelfBuild & Design, The People’s Friend, The Daily Express, The Observer, Outdoor Photography, Coast, The Simple Things and Writing Magazine.

His first book, One Hundred Ways For A Dog To Train Its Human, was published by Hodder & Stoughton in September 2003, with an initial print run of 10,000 copies. By the end of December 2003, over 100,000 copies had been sold to bookshops, and the book spent three weeks on the UK’s Top Ten Non-Fiction paperback bestseller lists. (Lifetime sales now exceed over a quarter of a million copies.) He became a full-time writer in January 2004. He’s since gone on to write over a dozen books, not all of them about dogs, though.

Simon has worked for a variety of organisations including a high street bank in southwest London, a government development agency, and a local authority somewhere on the Welsh Borders. When not writing, he enjoys walking and photography. When he’s not writing, he’s out taking photographs, particularly around his home patch of Shropshire, on the Welsh Borders. He also a BBC WeatherWatcher submitting photos on a frequent basis, which have been broadcast on both regional and national weather forecasts, under the name of Snapper Simon.

He’s self-published The Complete Article Writer, which offers advice to writers about how to construct, write and pitch articles to magazine editors. He bought back the rights to two other books, Photography for Writers and The Positively Productive Writer, and has since fully-updated both books and self-published them. All three books for writers now appear as part of his Practical Writer Series.

After two near-misses with traditional publishers (it got to their acquisitions meetings, but failed to get taken on), Simon self-published his cosy crime novel, Blooming Murder, the first in his Marquess of Mortiforde Mysteries.