Aspiring Authors Take Heart

by Richard A. (“Rick”) Noble

A couple of years before I retired in 2022, I decided that I was going to write a book. I had an idea for a historical fiction novel set during the Civil War which likely sprouted from seeds of interest in the era that were planted when I lived in Kentucky. I figured that if I could weave together some of the more interesting facts and people of those times by using a fictional character, specifically a self-centered cad, readers would not only be entertained, but they might painlessly learn some history. My target audience was young men, a notion that I’ll come back to shortly.

Learning to Balance Time and Creativity

Anyway, I wrote a couple of chapters but quickly realized that the project would have to wait until I retired. At the time I was the CEO of a software company, often on the road four days out of five, and I had twin teenage girls at home. I simply wasn’t going to have the time. So I set everything aside until the summer of 2022 when I dusted off that initial effort and got down to writing in earnest. I wrote, rewrote, and rewrote again, getting to about 10,000 words before hearing that the average novel is about 80,000 words. Suddenly the entire thing seemed like a really bad idea! But I showed those first words to a few trusted friends (Latin for people who will tell you what they really think), and their encouragement sent me scurrying back to my desk.

Finding Your Writing Rhythm

Now confident that I was onto something, I found myself reenergized and the words came faster and easier. At least most of the time. It took a while, but I began to realize that on certain days I could barely write two sentences, while on others, three to four thousand words might pour out. And I noticed that those bursts of text often required less editing than when I was struggling. Some writers will tell you that you should pick a specific time of day to work and stick to it. Others say that you should have a daily word goal. I have no doubt that different styles work for different people but, for me, Lesson #2 was to not try to force things. Enjoy those good days when everything flows but get up and do something else when they don’t. And that’s okay. You’re the boss on this journey.

Structuring Your Story for Success

In the beginning, I had created a basic spreadsheet of the major events and dates I wanted to cover in the book. I fleshed it out more fully at this stage so I could make sure that my character was “in position” at all the right moments and that I had a more defined end in sight. I’m a stickler for accuracy to the point that I even wanted to make sure that my character, whether on horseback or on a train or a ship, moved around in realistic timeframes. I changed the first chapter so that it actually revealed the end of the story, and everything that came after was about getting to my unlikely conclusion. The structure really helped, and my tempo improved again. So much so that, next thing I knew, I was at 110,000 words.

Avoiding Publishing Scams

Soon after that first book—King Cotton—was published, the calls started to roll in from production companies wanting to create a movie script, literary agents with “major marketing clout,” companies looking to produce mini-series, international book distributors, etc. They were all fake. 100% of them. But, as a proud new author, I eagerly and politely took all of their calls, at least until I saw the pattern emerge. Every one of those calls led to the same end, which was that they wanted my money. Some called it a co-investment, some said it was just “to prime the pump,” a few said it was to gauge my seriousness in a project. I so wanted all that interest to be real but, Lesson #4 was that real literary agents or production companies don’t ask you for money. They’ll tell you how they intend to make it for you. There are several websites that can help you navigate these scams, and one of the better ones is Writer Beware.

The Importance of Self-Promotion

According to AI (which I do not use to write, by the way), when you count self-published works, there are millions of new books that are released every year just in the U.S. So that makes it even more unlikely that you’ll be discovered by a production company or literary agent as described above. But it also means that you’ll need to do a little self-promotion to get noticed. A great way to do that is to arrange to have your book reviewed. A number of companies, including Reader Views, will do that for you for a small fee. I did some of that, but I was also fortunate to find a subject matter expert (a Civil War scholar in my case) who liked my book enough to submit a review to a magazine. Entering your title into award programs can also pay off. The Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY Awards), The Next Generation Indie Book Awards, and Reader Views Literary Awards are examples, but there are many others. I was skeptical of these at first, but King Cotton did well in one of the very first ones I entered. Specifically, it was nominated as one of the nine finalists for the 2023 INDIES Book of the Year Award in the War and Military Category, and there were more than 2,400 entries across all categories.

Let Your Audience Find You

I’ll end with another lesson I’ve learned, which was that my assumptions about the audience I was writing for was way off. I thought I was writing for young men but had an eighty-two-year-old reader of King Cotton email me last year saying that she grew up in the Washington area and knows all of the surrounding towns and battlegrounds that were mentioned therein. She told me that the book brought back fond memories of those places, including some of her and her siblings exploring the attic of their grandparents’ house, browsing through trunk after trunk of Civil War uniforms, hats, swords, medals, and other paraphernalia. Below her signature on that email she signed off, “Closet Confederate.” She also picked my book for her book club and invited me to speak at one of their meetings!

Final Thoughts and Upcoming Work

You can learn all about Rick’s books and see reviews at www.kingcottonbooks.com. The third book in what has unexpectedly become a trilogy will be published in the late spring of 2025. A Reader Views review of his second installment can be found here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard A. “Rick” Noble started his career in publishing at Canada’s National Newspaper, The Globe and Mail.  He moved to the U.S. in 1990 and continued to work as an executive in digital publishing in the newspaper, periodical, medical, aviation, and K-12 industries before retiring in 2022.  Always a history buff, Rick became even more interested in the Civil War during a brief period when he lived in Louisville, Kentucky.  He holds a B.A. and an M.B.A. from the University of Toronto and currently resides in Colorado. King Cotton is his first novel, King Cotton II -Kentucky Gold is his second and a third in the series, King Cotton III – Jack & the Ripper, will be published this spring. 

KING COTTON II – KENTUCKY GOLD

In the spring of 2023, a Kentucky farmer noticed the furrows behind his plow begin to sparkle in the sun. He had just inadvertently unearthed hundreds of Confederate gold coins, the newest from 1863. No one knows how or why they were there. Well, one man does. Cotton trader, photographer, philanderer, and Civil War veteran (having served with dubious distinction on both sides), Jack Bailey is back in King Cotton II – Kentucky Gold. Picking up exactly where King Cotton ends, just moments after Lincoln’s assassination, Bailey flees Washington justifiably fearing that he’ll be implicated. During his ensuing travels he encounters many of the famous characters of the day, such as Jefferson Davis, Wild Bill Hickok, Kit Carson, Frank and Jesse James, and Buffalo Bill Cody. Prior acquaintances, including Allan Pinkerton, Ulysses S. Grant, distiller John Beam, and P.T. Barnum return. As usual, Bailey’s exploits place him at many notable historic events, including the first quick draw gunfight in the old west, herding longhorn up the Old Chisholm Trail, one of the earliest train robberies in America, Black Friday of September 1869, and the Battle of Beecher Island, Colorado. True to form, he finds himself in various boudoirs along the way, entertaining ladies that range from famous actresses to borderline sociopaths. As it was in King Cotton, all of the events, timelines, and most of the characters in this sequel are real.

CONNECT WITH RICK NOBLE

Website: www.kingcottonbooks.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-noble-8774ba4/