We have a constant stream of books landing on the features desk each week, but increasing numbers of local authors are turning to the virtual world of self-publishing, getting their work out online.

Retired teacher John Waddington-Feather, from Bradford, has written a range of books, from children’s stories to detective novels featuring his sleuth priest, the Reverend Detective Inspector Blake Hartley.

The six Hartley novels – also featuring sidekick Detective Sergeant Ibrahim Khan, a second-generation Bradford Asian returning from a stint in London – are set in ‘Keighworth’ police station, and since being published on Kindle last June, John says they’ve had “astonishing success”.

The vice-chairman of the JB Priestley Society and a life member of both the Yorkshire Dialect Society and the Bronte Society, John founded the small-press imprint Feather Books, and over the years his books have attracted a growing readership in many countries, including Germany, Russia and Ukraine.

Last summer, his crime novels and one of his romantic historical novels were published as e-books on Kindle.

“I’ve been very ill over the past two years and have been in and out of hospital for major operations as well as three nights week on dialysis. I’m also approaching 80, so last June I said to my eldest daughter, who’s a doctor and monitors me, that I was stopping self-publishing in paperback, as it was all getting too much.

“She suggested I keep on writing but put my work on Kindle.

“She placed four of my detective novels on Kindle and they sold 20 copies. We thought we were doing well, as they wouldn’t have sold 20 copies in a month as paperbacks. In December they sold 720 copies. Since then sales have exploded as the Americans have taken the Yorkshire detectives to their hearts.”

John plans to put more books on Kindle, including his Quill Hedgehog children’s novels, with an environmental slant. Quill’s Adventures In The Great Beyond was written in the 1960s as a protest against pollution and urbanisation of the countryside.

His romantic novels include the Chance-Child trilogy, a saga set among the Pennine Hills of Keighworth sprawling several generations.

Another Bradford writer, AC Michael, has written a novel, Clem’s War, set in the city’s Ukrainian community in the 1960s.

“There is still a thriving Ukrainian community here, many of whom would recognise the settings and relate to the themes,” he says. “The events in Soviet and post-independence Ukraine are also discussed.

The book follows various characters in the Ukrainian community as it prepares to celebrate the Easter holiday. They include a woman called Sofia, “the hard-working and unnoticed daughter of Ukrainian immigrants in Bradford”, who works hard and tries to please everyone, especially her strict father.

During this fateful Easter, she becomes witness to the power of the Soviet secret police in silencing Ukrainian nationalists “and those who want the world to hear about what really happened in Ukraine in 1933”.

Clem’s War is written in a no-nonsense style, blending humorous accounts of life and events in 1960s Bradford, when the new ‘Ukrainish’ community was becoming established, with events of recent Ukrainian history.

For more about John Waddington-Feather’s books or Feather Books, e-mail john@waddysweb.freeuk.com.