During a recent “virtual book tour” with several book bloggers, I was asked what three things I learned while writing the Finding Billy Battles Trilogy. It was a good question because it prompted me to pause and reflect on the fiction-writing process in a way I had never done before.

Here are the answers I provided:

NUMBER ONE:  When I was teaching journalism as a Dean and Professor at the University of Illinois, I learned more from teaching than I ever thought possible. The same goes for writing fiction. I spent most of my professional life as a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune in Asia and Latin America. That work required me to deal with facts, real people, real events, and genuine human emotion. I couldn’t make up what I was reporting. I had to stick to what I saw, what I heard, what people told me, etc.  And I had to do my best to write compelling stories using only those facts. I generally succeeded, but it was often a lot of hard work.

As I wrote the Finding Billy Battles Trilogy, I found myself in a strange new world where I could create the facts, the people, the events, and the human emotion. At first, it was a wonderful sense of freedom — especially for a journalist who had previously been confined to gathering facts. Then I realized that with freedom comes a need for discipline in one’s writing. You need to keep the story “real” even as you invent it. In historical fiction, which is what I classify my book as, you need to understand the boundaries of the time and place in which you are writing. Otherwise, you are forcing your readers, many of whom may be more knowledgeable about the time and place in which you have set your story, to suspend their beliefs beyond what they should.

NUMBER TWO:  So I learned that if I was going to do this correctly, I needed to do the kind of research that would allow me to create accurate representations of people, places, events, as well as the senses that all authors need to engage readers with when writing–smell, sound, sight, touch, and taste. I spent a lot of time trying to get 19th-century Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, etc., right. I worked hard on getting the lingua franca of the time and place right. I used a lot of the colloquial speech I grew up hearing my great-grandparents, my grandparents, and my parents use. I incorporated a lot of the idiomatic expressions that were intrinsic to Kansas and the American West of the 19th Century.

NUMBER THREE:  Finally, I learned that writing the book is the least of the job. Once the book is finished, you need to distribute it to potential readers, reviewers, and others. Marketing your book is likely even more challenging than writing it. I have learned that there is an enormous universe of book bloggers, reviewers, and book websites, including Amazon, Goodreads, Smashwords, the Independent Author Network, the Historical Novel Society, CreateSpace, NetGalley, Story Cartel, Book Daily, AuthorsDen, iAuthor, and others.

I have spent 85 percent of my time engaging with book bloggers, reviewers, and the websites above, and only about 15 percent of my time actually writing. Marketing your finished work is a significant investment of time — and money. Traditional publishers have published my previous books, so I haven’t been involved in the marketing process.

I like the Indie route simply because you have more control over the way the book looks, the content, and the various venues for selling it. However, it does take time, and if you are not ready to make that kind of investment of time, you need to think twice before going the Indie publishing route. As for me, I plan to continue down the Indie path now that I’m familiar with the new publishing landscape.

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