About Books: The Nicholas Keating Novels

 

 

The Nicholas Keating novels began as one short story titled, “Coffee.” The idea came to me as I was walking through my town one December afternoon. It had snowed a few days earlier, something that rarely happens anymore in December. The snow had been plowed and the sidewalks were clear except for occasional black ice where the snow had melted on the lawns and flowed onto the pavement. I nearly slipped on one bit of it.

That reminded me of a pair of boots I had in the 1980s. They were fleece-lined boots with 2-inch stiletto heels. That height heel isn’t that bad on high heels, but in my opinion, has no place on a pair of boots. I don’t know what I was thinking when I bought them. Yes, I wanted a dressy pair of snow boots, but that’s kind of a crazy thing to want. Snow boots are meant to get through snow. Dressy boots are not.

As I walked home, I thought about a woman wearing boots like that and falling because of black ice. And an image popped into my mind of a young man for whom chivalry wasn’t dead, who helped her up and made sure she wasn’t injured.

Of course, in stories, help is never simply a random act with nothing more to it. My town has a coffee shop that is quite popular, so I made coffee a center point for a thank-you mini-date.

The story was not without it’s amusing bits. The young man, it turns out, is a violinist on loan from a Welsh orchestra. The woman’s second run-in with him shows him with his violin case, but his youthful appearance makes her think the 25-year-old musician is still in high school.

Throughout the twists and turns of the short story, the two, of course, are attracted and end up becoming an item despite the woman’s (Rachel) certainty that men leave and the fact that the young man (Nicholas) is only on loan for 6 months.

When the story ended, it was a case of me wanting more of my characters. These two had quickly become friends I wanted to know more about. So, the short story quickly became a trilogy of short stories.

That trilogy, alas, wasn’t enough, and I ended up writing a second trilogy of much longer short stories. While the first three were told from Rachel’s point of view, the second set were told from Nicholas’s.  Then there was a connecting short story between the two so I could make a novel out of it.

Once I was finished with writing and editing, I tried to get the book published without success. On recommendation, I had a professional editor work on it.

When a professional edits a novel, they don’t cut things out or change things around.  They redline things and make suggestions on changes. Some suggestions are general (e.g. there’s too much dialogue that doesn’t go anywhere. Try cutting some of it down) some are direct suggestions of how to change a sentence. Many of the suggestions were right on target. I cut out two or three chapters  that didn’t further the story. But there were others that were ridiculous. For example, they took the most poetic description in the entire novel and suggested I change it to something bland. My husband was incensed about that. He had read that paragraph, and thought the sentence was perfect. In fact, he jokingly said he’d divorce me if I changed it.

The “professional” also commented that the book was too long and needed to be shortened. There was no way I could adequately cut as much out as they suggested without destroying the integrity of the book.

When a book is edited this way, there is no requirement that the author follow every suggestion made. It is what the editor thinks will make the novel more likely to be published.

I went through each suggestion, following some, like cutting chapters, and ignoring others, such as cutting a fantastic description. But in my desire to follow the request that I shorten the novel, I came up with an idea that the editor hadn’t suggested: I cut the book in half and made two novels. The first novel was the first three short stories and the bridge story. It formed a natural break. Since the second trilogy was longer than the first, it ended up making a novel slightly longer than the first.

I still had no success attracting a publisher. The ones who take unsolicited manuscripts – ones submitted by an author rather than by an agent – take very few novels every year. They are usually publishers that are smaller, so they don’t have the budget of, say, Simon and Schuster.

I also tried finding an agent with no better success. So, having heard of Amazon’s publishing branch, I thought I’d try self-publishing. At that time, self-publishing was finally emerging from a taboo that would guarantee no “real” publisher would ever touch your work to being the preferred route to go to prove to a future publisher that you had a following that would guarantee future sales.

Having decided to take the plunge, I discovered Amazon publishing encompasses a wide range of choices. They have generic covers for use, although that can mean your novel’s cover may have been used by others. Or you can pay a fee to have one of their artists design a cover for your book. Another alternative is doing your own cover. They give you all of the measurements needed to do that yourself.

You get to choose what size your paperback will be from 5 or 6 sizes. Making your book an e-book – only available on Kindle, of course – is another choice. You can do paperback or Kindle or both, and they make it easy to do each one. (Recently they have launched hard-cover book publishing as well.) There is no charge for any of this, since you're putting everything together on Amazon yourself.

Amazon allows you to decide on your royalty amount for the sale of each book, either 35% or 70%. The percentage you want to make also determines the minimum price for your book.

There are many things you can do with Amazon, like having them do marketing, editing and so on, each with a price tag. I chose to simply publish on their site. My sales depend on word of mouth. My husband has been kind enough to design most of my book covers (and a few have been pictures I’ve taken that he’s then designed as covers with the title and author placed on them). It does save me several hundred dollars from letting Amazon do all of the work, but I also don’t get the exposure they might provide. Of course, exposure doesn’t guarantee sales.

All of the homework aside, once I had finished those two novels, I realized I still wasn’t finished with my characters. I wanted to know about Nicholas’s childhood in Wales. So I wrote another book. Then I wanted to know how things worked out with families on two sides of the Atlantic. So I wrote another novel. Then, after some sorrows I wanted to know what happened next, and I wanted to know more about their son as he grew up. So there was a fifth novel.

By that time, I felt that I had written as much as I could about these characters. I didn’t want to over-write them. I’ve read series where this has happened, and it’s disappointing to me. I think it’s important for an author to know when to say when.

There are authors who have 15-20 novels about the same characters without making their characters boring. Bernard Cornwell has written 22 novels in the Sharpe series, and 13 in the Last Kingdom series. Patrick Taylor’s Irish Country Doctor series stands at 16 novels and counting without becoming repetitious or boring. That, particularly, could have become very repetitious in less skilled hands.

So far, I have limited my series to five books. My Dark Faery series was originally supposed to be four books, and it came as a bit of a surprise a few years after those four were complete that I had an idea for a fifth book, based  on the main Vampyre of the novels. But nothing has convinced me to write anything about those characters since the fifth book was finished.

I have made a conscious effort to have limited sequels to any of my books. So far, by the time I’ve written four or five novels in a series, I’m ready to move on and find new characters to write about. I’d rather leave readers wanting more than have them – as I did with one author – toss the books aside saying, “Enough, already!”

I also like to write my novels in such a way that a reader can start with any of the books in a series and not feel lost. There are references to things that happened in other novels, but with enough background that they’re not frustrated by having started in the wrong place. I think of the stories as somewhat circular in nature, so that the final story often circles back to where the first one started, yet each one is complete.

This didn’t happen with the Nicholas Keating stories. The novels progress from when Nicholas is 25 to when he’s in his 50s. But even still, a reader can start at any one of the novels and not be lost.

The Nicholas Keating novels are my favorites of all of the novels I’ve written. They’ve become comfortable friends, and I know them the way most people know their closest friends. Of course, I know far more about them than I’d ever tell. They are friends, after all.