In this episode, Kate welcomes back episode 1 guest Dr. Megan Kate Nelson as the very first return guest on Drafting the Past! Megan is a historian and the author of five books, and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. In our first conversation, we talked about Megan’s writing process, favorite writing advice, and more. But in this episode, we’re going deeper! While we talk about Megan’s new book, The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier, she’s sharing a look behind the scenes at the timeline of a trade press book, how she balances promoting one book and researching the next one, and even some of the behind-the-scenes drama. Plus, she let me take a look at the book’s original proposal, and share FIVE failed proposals before she landed on a winner for her next book. This episode is a rare glimpse into the nitty gritty of publishing as a trade press historian, and you’re going to get a ton out of it. Plus, stick around to the end—we have a little (okay, BIG) announcement to share!
Note: Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links. When you buy books through these links, you not only support the authors, you also help to keep Drafting the Past going. Thank you!
Mentioned in this episode:
- Megan Kate Nelson, The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier
- Megan Kate Nelson, Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America
- Megan Kate Nelson, The Three Cornered-War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West
- Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War
- Megan Kate Nelson, Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp
- Drafting the Past Episode 1: Megan Kate Nelson Experiments with Structure
- Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
Transcription:
Kate Carpenter 0:01
Hello and welcome back to Drafting the Past. This is a podcast all about the craft of writing history. I am your host, Kate Carpenter, and today, something very special is happening on the podcast. Today is the first returning guest to Drafting the Past. And not only the first returning guest, but it is the return of the very first guest of Drafting the Past. Welcome back to the show, Dr. Megan Kate Nelson.
Megan Kate Nelson 0:24
Thank you so much. I'm so excited. You can't really see me if you're listening, but I'm doing a little dance, a little return to Drafting the Past dance. It's an excellent day for this very special episode. I'm so excited.
Kate Carpenter 0:37
So because this is a very special episode, we're gonna shake things up a little and do it differently. If you want to hear all the sort of standard questions I ask about how people got into writing and process and all those sorts of things, go back to Episode One of Drafting the Past. Listen to all of that. I am not asking Megan to explain all of that to us again, but she has generously agreed to really take a deep dive into the publication process of her newest book, The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier. First up, can you just give us, like a brief summary of this book? What is this book?
Megan Kate Nelson 1:12
So The Westerners really tells two stories and interweaves them. One story is the story of seven super charismatic, really interesting people, four women and three men who lived in and traveled through the American West during the 19th century and built lives for themselves and communities and really constructed the region through their relationships and through their their work and their family lives. And the other story that gets interwoven with this is the emergence of a frontier myth created mostly by Easterners, mostly by white Easterners, that systematically erased people like the Westerners I am talking about in the book. And the stakes of this are that, you know, when you erase people from a really super powerful national myth like the frontier myth, it makes it easier to define them as non citizens, as un-American, and then it makes it even easier to take their rights away. So the book really has this really broad sweep, but it is also speaking to a practice that has a very long history in the United States.
Kate Carpenter 2:33
It's also a great book to read. I will just add that there are incredible stories in this book, some really, I mean, obviously some really painful histories, but also just some really fun stories, fun characters to follow that you probably have not read about before. So yes, it's going to be great. I'm very excited for people to read it. Let's do a quick, like, previously on Drafting the Past. The last time you were here, you you had just published Saving Yellowstone. First of all, has anything changed about your process since the last time we talked?
Megan Kate Nelson 3:05
Not really, I mean Saving Yellowstone was published in March 2022, so we were just coming out of the pandemic. And I think when we talked before, we were talking about how the pandemic kind of changed the way we were writing and what we valued about writing. I also, since then, have moved. So I left the house with the home office, and now have an apartment in Boston. So I think the one thing that's really changed is that I've expanded my kind of repertoire of writing spaces. I know we talked about cafes last time, and now I have, there's a co working space in our building. I like to come and write on the third floor here. And then also I became a member of the Boston Athenaeum, which is one of the oldest membership libraries in the United States, and beautiful and just a couple of blocks from my apartment. And that place is really magical. If you haven't been there, go there to do research or to just take a tour. It has multiple floors with writing spaces, quiet rooms, things like that. It's a very inspiring place to write. But I also, in the last year, was on a nine month fellowship at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and so I wrote outside for the first time, which was, I mean, people who live in in that kind of climate probably do this all the time, but I was very unused to it, and I wasn't sure that I could do it, but I did find it very pleasing. I did have grand plans of finishing The Westerners in one of the reading rooms at the Huntington, which is a beautiful space that has two stories. It had book, has books all around it's like it's one of those spaces, and I'm sure you've been to these, where the writing milieu, like, the writing vibe is so good, like, because everyone in there is kind of quietly working that you've all got, you know, there's that buzz of kind of intellectual life. And then also the tables were the right height. You could adjust the chairs. It was like a beautiful, and you could plug things in. There was not a problem with any of that. So I had that plan that I was going to finish The Westerners in that space, but then the Altadena fires ruined that plan, and I ended up finishing The Westerners in a hotel bar in Santa Barbara. So I think what has remained the same, and I can't remember if I gave this general piece of advice before, but, you know, I love hearing about people's writing practices, but I also think it's super important to be able to adapt and change if you have to. You know, if, if I had been paralyzed by that change, I wouldn't have finished the book on time, which would have been bad. So, so yeah, I would just say, in the past, kind of three years, it's been a really kind of wild ride. But also I've, I've written in a lot of different really fun places.
Kate Carpenter 6:17
There's also something really fitting about being displaced by a fire, and then finishing writing a book called The Westerners in a bar in Santa Barbara.
Megan Kate Nelson 6:26
Yes, and I had, no one who knows me will be surprised that I had a margarita at hand in those last moments, the final moments, yes. So that actually was very pleasing because that I couldn't have had that at the Huntington. So that was a different thing altogether.
Kate Carpenter 6:47
Okay, so the last time we talked, you mentioned The Westerners at the end of our conversation, when I asked what you were working on next, it was still called The Westerners then, and you mentioned that you were just starting research on that. So where in the process were you? You had already written a proposal and signed a deal.
Megan Kate Nelson 7:04
Is that right? Yes, okay, I had sold the book. So we talked in probably February 2022 and I had pitched the book, and they had accepted it in September '21 and then we'd it takes a while to do these contracts. Everyone, lawyers have to review them. You have to do all of this stuff, signing and countersigning, signing. So it takes a couple of months. So I think I had signed the contract in November, and I had already done a fair bit of research, because I know we'll talk about this a little later too, but the I you have to do a little bit of research to write the proposal. So I'd already done a little bit of that, but I didn't really start the hardcore research for the book, really, until the next year, like the fall of 2022. That was the first time I kind of went into the archives and I did some research trips and really started to do all the background reading that I needed to do, and then began writing maybe a couple months after that. So I was in process, but not fully, fully, kind of in the weeds of The Westerners yet.
Kate Carpenter 8:18
Okay, so listeners, Megan has been very generous and has shared the proposal for The Westerners with me so that we can take a look, really from the very beginning of this book. So it was very fun to read this. I have so many questions about it, but I know first you mentioned that it might be worth just talking about the difference between like an academic book proposal and a trade press book proposal. What do you find to be different about them?
Megan Kate Nelson 8:42
Well, one of the major differences, especially if it's your first academic book proposal, it's coming from your dissertation usually. So you've got a completed manuscript that you are sending in with the proposal, and so the proposal is a little bit shorter. In that instance, you're just kind of introducing yourself to the editor. You're saying this is what the book is about. You give a little precis or abstract that you probably wrote anyway as part of your dissertation submission process, and then you just kind of explain the structure of the book and how it's moving. And then a historiographical section, you know, what is your intervention here? What are the big arguments you are making? Who's the audience for the book? Where would it be taught? Like, which classes would professors teach it in? And then maybe some little odds and ends in terms of length and willingness to revise and things like that. For trade proposals, the structure is a little different, and it really depends on where you are in your career. Also, my first proposal for the Three-Cornered War was 70 pages long because it included a full outline of 30 chapters. So each chapter got a paragraph, and then it had also a writing sample from the book itself, which was a chapter. It was an Alonzo Ickis chapter, which wasn't very long, but it was included because, as my agent said, you know, nobody knows you. You've written two academic books, but no one in the trade world knows you, so you have to, the entire proposal, then, is a writing sample, but you also have to include a writing sample. And I was like, Okay, we'll do whatever. And so usually, I mean, what's really wild about the whole thing is that I asked several other people who had written trade books and secured contracts to see their proposals, and they were all different. So it was not the most helpful thing in the world. Some of it has to do with the preferences of your agent, because your agent will usually work with you on the proposal. I did give my agent a proposal when I was kind of talking to her initially about whether she was going to represent me, and then we worked on the proposal for about six months together, and at that point I probably had about 40 or 50% of the research done. But it was not like having the dissertation in hand, right, where you can say, Oh yes, I can send you the entire thing right now. So what I developed was kind of my own structure where you do a kind of scene setting opening for a couple of pages, and then move into an overview. And this is an important thing, because a lot of trade editors edit a lot of different kinds of books. They'll do history nonfiction, but like my editor is also a fiction editor, mostly. So they're not experts in the field, so you have to give them a sense of what is actually happening at this moment in time that you're talking about in the book. If it's late 20th century, if it's the 18th century, you know what's going on. How many people wait? What's the population? If you're doing something in the United States, what's the population of the United States at this moment? You know, where do people live? What's happening? Do people understand germ theory? You know, I mean, like these kinds of things, where you you set the scene? So that people, the editors reading can understand where the book is going to take place, and you know, what kind of world you're going to be describing. So the overview, usually, I use it to give historical background, and then I also use it to make my big arguments. There is a section called a comps section, which is kind of like historiography in the academic proposal, but different trade editors want to know that your argument is unique. They especially want to know if you've got some cache of sources that no one's ever looked at before. That's a very appealing kind of thing. How is your book different from every other book that's come out on this topic? They're very interested in that, but mostly they want to know if this kind of book has a market, if other books that have taken this approach or talked about this time period or this subject have done well in the market. So really you're doing comparables. You're saying like, well, yes, Doris Kearns Goodwin has published a book on this, and these people have done it or, you know, for something like the Three Cornered War or The Westerners, it's interesting, because academics have published a lot of books in both Civil War West and in just US Western history in general, but the trade world is a much smaller and more narrowly defined world. So really, for The Westerners proposal, that section on comparables was about David McCullough's The Pioneers, because I was really pitching that this book would be in conversation with that book. And then also a book like HW Brands' Dreams of El Dorado. You know, these kind of epic Westerns that are written for for the trade audience. And then I will often have a structure section, as we will likely talk about. You probably had a very big question about why my structure section was so short in the Westerners, it usually is not that short. And then there's a little usually you give a little bio, although why I gave them a bio for The Westerners? I really don't know, because they knew me already from two two books, but I included it anyway. And then you also kind of outline and say, Okay, how many words do I imagine this book will be? I would like to have this many maps. I would like to have this many images, because they want to know kind of what the deal is. Their, trade books, really, they'd like you to hit that sweet spot between 100,000 words and 120, 130. Pitching a 200,000 word book is not gonna fly for the trade, because that rarely happens. Unless you're Ron Chernow, you're not allowed to write a book that long. And even if you are Ron Chernow, like, let's just be honest, he shouldn't be allowed. Yeah, let's consider taking that down a notch, maybe to 150. But, but, yeah, so you, you're basically proposing all of these different elements, plus, in the trade proposal, you really are giving them a sense of your writing style. And that's really one of the most important things for editors, is to see how you write. Are you an engaging writer? Someone told me a while ago. I think it might have been a member of one of my writing groups. And he said that his agent told him what you have to remember is that editors are reading proposals on a Friday night when they're really tired, so you have to get their attention and keep their attention, which is an interesting way to think about it, and I don't know how true that is. I haven't polled any editors, but that is one of the things to think about, is who is your reader, and what do you need to do to kind of get them, persuade them that this book is worth buying.
Kate Carpenter 16:19
So this proposal is a little different, in part because you, you are pitching this book to the same press and the same editor that has published your previous two books. So I assume that's part of why it's sort of shorter, because they already know you and have faith in you and your writing ability.
Megan Kate Nelson 16:36
Yes, because this one was, what this was, 20 pages, about 23 or 24. Yeah, yeah. This one was much shorter because I did not include and now, basically, after Three Cornered, I don't need to include a writing sample, especially when I'm pitching just to the press I've worked with, because they're like, Yeah, we know we're intimately, intimately familiar with your writing style, yeah, so that that part just gets left out, and then the structure section can be a little bit more. That's That's because, and we talked about this a little bit in our previous conversation, that I like to play around with structure, and often the structure I propose will not be the structure that the book ends up with, because of the way I experience the writing of this. So yes, that was particularly hilarious. I went back and read the proposal also, which was slightly horrifying, in preparation for our conversation. And I think I sent you a picture where I had just, like, circled the structure section and just wrote "insane."
Kate Carpenter 17:49
I mean, how did it feel to go back and read the proposal now that you know the book is out? What were your thoughts proposal?
Megan Kate Nelson 17:59
You know, the overview, well, I thought the opening section is a section with Maria Gertrudis Barcelo, who is one of my favorite protagonists in the book. She built a gambling empire for herself in Santa Fe and so the opening section, the scene is her dealing Spanish monte, which was the card game that built her fortune. She was particularly good at that game and dealing it, and made a lot of money from a lot of very hopeful drunk gamblers. And that section, I thought, I was like, that went on way too long. Like that did not need to be. I think the intro scene was, like, eight pages long or something, and I had a lot of background in there. I was giving a lot of background about Santa Fe and New Mexico territory. And I was, I was doing a lot in that intro. And I was like, that went on for far too long. And then the overview, I actually thought had some good elements in it. And I was like, Ooh, I should have found a way to put this part into the book itself. But I really liked that part of the overview. I was explaining kind of what the American West is as a as a place, and then as an idea. I was talking about the emergence of the frontier myth and all the different kinds of writing and material culture and visual culture that went into creating that pioneer the frontier myth. And I think in very early versions of the prologue, I basically took that section and put it into the prologue, but it just wasn't, it didn't work. Nobody liked it. I presented it to some some of my writing groups, and they were like, No thank you. We'll pass on this. So that's one of the things. Like, I don't know if you do this, and I don't know how many people out there do, but if I've written something before that I think is really good, sometimes I'll cut and paste it into a new thing, and it almost never works, because the new thing is the new thing, right? And even if you're enamored of the way you articulated something in the past, sometimes it just doesn't, it doesn't work. And so I abandoned all of that in the prologue and just wrote a new prologue. But it was a good thing to kind of sit and think with. But yes, though, there were two major changes. One was in the list of protagonists. Two people, as you likely noted, disappeared entirely, and two people were added. And we could, we'll talk about the details of that, I'm sure. But then I had pitched, and I don't know why I thought about this, but I think I I talked about The Warmth of Other Suns in our previous conversation. And I love that book. Many people love that book. Many people think it's one of the best pieces kind of narrative nonfiction in the current age. And she's got, Isabel Wilkerson has a very interesting structure in that book. It's, it kind of has back to back biographies. It has deep dives into context. It kind of flies around a little bit. And I was enamored of that structure. I actually went and made an outline of it from the book, and the outline was, like, 15 pages long. It was insane. But I was like, maybe this is a good way to capture the sort of broad sweep of American history. And so that's what I pitched. I pitched this sort of absolutely crazy like Part One would be antebellum period through the Civil War, and then part two would be reconstruction through the 1890s and the protagonist would come in and out, and there'd be all this other stuff. And I do, I vividly remember when I had, because what usually happens is you send in the proposal, and then you and your agent and the editor get on, like a zoom, and you chat, and if the especially if the editor has questions, and my editor was like, What's going on with the structure? And I was like, I don't know. And I was like, I it might work, it may not. And I was like, if it doesn't, I will talk to you about it and do something else. And you know, we had done two books together, so that takes a lot of trust. Like, I don't think I would have done that with her on the first book project, because I think she would have been like, you're an insane person, like, I'd never seen pages from you. I don't know what you're going to do. Why would I take this risk? Why would I take this chance on you and invest in your book? Because that's what they're doing, right? They're investing in you as a writer, and they're investing in the book when they buy it. So I remember that she had, she had some feelings and some apprehensions, and she should have, because it was insane. I was like, Why did I think this was gonna work? I mean, I did try. I wrote the first couple of chapters, and they were mini chapters. They were like, four or five pages each, because they were a bio of each person, kind of back to back. And I presented them at book squad, one of my writing groups, and they were just not having it. They were like, This is completely insane. Okay, I actually gave up that structure pretty quickly, and I think it's a good thing, because I did manage. I kind of went back to a little bit of the Three Cornered War interwoven type of structure, although often several people show up at the same time in any given chapter. And so it was a little looser than that, a little looser than than the Three Cornered but, yeah, that was so… You know, the lesson you learn is, I mean, if you have enough experience, you can do this sort of thing, but it's also worthwhile to just feel like the proposal is just that, right? It's a proposal so you can change it after the fact, but you do have to consult. You can't just write a completely different book, so you have to consult with your editor the entire time and just be very transparent about and say, like, well, I'm going to try to do this this way, but you know, if it doesn't work, I'll do something else. Because, you know, you have to be able to do that in this this book writing game.
Kate Carpenter 24:24
I do want to ask about the change in the cast of characters, because that surprised me reading the proposal. So what happened? What happened to our missing characters? Why did you swap them out?
Megan Kate Nelson 24:36
I know. So two of them got swapped out. One was a guy named Filomeno Gallotti, and he was an Italian immigrant. And see again, this is the thing where I was in love with him as a protagonist, because I and I think I we talked about this in our previous interview, I had pitched a book about him as a detective story, as a as a kind of true crimeish sort of book, where he would be one protagonist as the murderer, and then a detective would be the other one who kind of chased him down. And it was all based around a set of murders in 1875 Denver. So I had pitched that book. I had written a whole proposal for that and it did not make it past editorial. I'm not even sure that my editor even presented it to her fellow editors, because they felt it was too narrow of a story. But I loved him, so I was like, I'm doing it. He's going to be in this book. He is going to kind of represent European immigrants who are coming to the west. He was coming from south to north a little bit because he he immigrated through New Orleans. So I was like, that's great. Like, he can give me directional interest, plus he's going to be an Italian immigrant. You don't really think about Europe, European immigration during this period, which is the early 1870s, to western cities, and then it was also going to allow me to talk about the West as urbanized, because the image of the West, and certainly the image of the frontier West, is distinctly not urbanized. There are little towns where people have shootouts. But other than that, it's a it's wilderness, right, usually empty, but sometimes not. So he was in there. And again, I think it was because I loved him, not because he fit with any kind of larger argument I wanted to make. So he was there for a little while, because his story would not have started until the kind of back half of the book. But once I had written the first part of the book and then revised the first part of the book with this larger argument that was evolving, I was like, he's not, he's just not really, not really fitting in. Plus, to bring him in was going to lengthen the book by about 20,000 words, and that was going to be a problem. The other person who exited the scene was Henry Johnson, who was a Buffalo Soldier. And, you know, I really wanted to have a protagonist who would represent the Black West, which has been largely ignored until recently in much of us Western history. And so he had been born enslaved. He had joined the army. He ended up fighting indigenous peoples throughout the West, in Utah, in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, like he was everywhere. His first major battle was at Beecher Island where he helped to save white soldiers in Colorado who had been set upon by indigenous warriors. So I was like, well, his would be a great story, but I had another person in the book, Ovando Hollister, who was giving me military history. And I know, Kate that you, we'll talk about this in a second. But Kate read, she was one of my, my readers for the book, for the book manuscript and the Civil War chapter, agreed with my editor that the Civil War chapter was too indulgent. There was too much of that in there. I knew I was going to have that. I knew I was going to have Sand Creek. So Henry Johnson was just giving me like too much. It was too much US Army, and I wanted a kind of breadth of representation. So he exited, and instead of his story, I found Jim Beckwourth's story, which, you know, he is a really incredible protagonist in The Westerners. Also born into slavery. His father was his enslaver, and he was later freed, and he took part in almost every single major event you think of in US Western history. He shows up everywhere.
Kate Carpenter 28:53
He's like the Forrest Gump of the US West.
Megan Kate Nelson 28:56
He is, and it was wild. Plus, he wrote his own autobiography. He kind of dictated his autobiography to this guy named Thomas Bonner, and it was published in 1856 so it's one of the few Black autobiographies that's not a fugitive slave narrative, and in that period, in the 1850s and one of the few frontier autobiographies written about and by someone who is not white. So that provided me, I have this whole great chapter where I talk about the writing and the publishing of that book and his form of kind of self representation and the kind of racial identity mixing that he does in that book and avoiding that he does in that book. And so he was giving me a kind of more interesting, broader representation than Henry Johnson. So I didn't have anyone who really kind of came in to replace Gallotti, but I did ultimately add Sacagawea, who would be, then, the first voice in the book. And I think that was because I was thinking about it, and as pitched as proposed, The Westerners would start in the 1830s which I thought was ridiculous. Like, I was like, wait a minute. Why am I doing that? That's way too late. Like, I need to be talking about the Louisiana Purchase. I need to be talking about Lewis and Clark, because this is one of those major foundational moments of the creation of the frontier myth and the West emerging in the in the white American imagination on the east coast. But I really wanted, I didn't want Lewis or Clark to be the first protagonist. So I wanted the person to be indigenous. I wanted a woman to be speaking. My previous two books were very dude heavy, and I was just like, I want to write about more women. So that went into the calculus also, and it was a little scary. I'm not gonna lie. Like Sacagawea is such a mythical figure in our culture, but it was really fascinating to dig into her history. And one of the things that that I do in the book is is show her life before Lewis and Clark and after Lewis and Clark. So she's not just frozen in that moment of being a guide for white American dudes. Yeah, so she came in. But when I whenever I take people out, which I do all the time, like I've done it in all three, I'll probably do it again in the next project. But whenever I do that, I call my editor, and I make sure that she's okay, I explain why I'm doing what I'm doing, and then she's like, and usually she's like, okay. She's never been like, no, no, you need to keep that person in there. Sure. So my instincts, I think, have been pretty good after the fact, even though my my proposals often are a little bit off base. But yeah, that I just kind of take it for granted now, and I think my editor understands that, you know, these books are a work in progress, but it is, it is a weird thing, and I know that a lot of people are super uncomfortable with the thought of writing a proposal and selling a book before you've written anything sure, you know, because we're used to writing the whole thing and then pitching it. That's our first experience with publication, and it is a little bit weird, but you just kind of get comfortable with the flexibility of it and being adaptable.
Kate Carpenter 32:27
I mean, one of the things that's so interesting about pitching the book, that's not a finished product, right, is that then you have the set amount of time to make a finished product. What was the timeline like, you know, from the time that you sold The Westerners to when you had to have a manuscript ready? What was that schedule?
Megan Kate Nelson 32:48
That schedule was, what was it three years? I think I was supposed to submit in October 2024 so it was going to be three years exactly for publication in October 2025, so October, for the trades, is this very big month. There's a huge glut of books. But they do that because it's perfect timing for award season. It's sort of like, you know, putting all the Oscar movies out in November and December. You know, like you want these books fresh in people's minds, and then, of course, it's the run up to the holidays, and so it's gift giving and all of that stuff. So I was running late, as I was on Three Cornered as well, although not Saving Yellowstone, because we were on a hard deadline for that, to get it out for the 150th anniversary of the park. So and again, like you, you have a due date set in the contract, but that is also negotiable, like I, from what I've heard, there are people who are years late on books, like years and years, and I would never go that far, and I don't think my editor or my agent would not let me do that. But six months is a kind of a reasonable extension, so I extended not even six but to I finished the book and submitted it, then in January, like mid January of '25. So then we had a little more than a year to to do all of the revisions and the production process, which is what they like to do, that it's not, it can be faster, I think, and it can definitely be faster for fiction, but for non fiction, there's a lot in the production process, a lot of copy editing rounds, the creation of the maps, the securing of the photo permissions, all of that stuff and layout takes a little bit longer. So they'd like to have, they'd like to have, I think, at least eight months between final, final submission, after you've done some revisions, and the publication of the book. So then the publication got moved. Moved to then from fall '25 to spring '26 and then got kind of moved around again, which was exciting, though not welcome, and originally had an April publication date, and now has been moved back to March 31 so so again, that's it's always a little bit negotiable, even though, if you start moving things around too dramatically, it messes up everyone's production schedule. And they've got, you know, these presses are a little bit and these editors are a little bit like air traffic controllers, you know, they're sort of trying to bring all of these planes in, and their big thing is, you know, my editor doesn't want to be bringing out multiple books by her authors at the same time. Like, that's just not, that's not helpful for anyone. So, yeah, but it was, it was basically three years of research and writing for this one. But again, that's, I mean that. See, I know that seems very fast to academics, but this is my only job. So I, you know, am supposed to be working on this full time, and the advanced money is going toward kind of paying me for my time, and also paying for research trips and anything else that I need to do to support the writing of the book.
Kate Carpenter 36:17
Do you, for yourself, do you split up that time in particular ways.? Do you give yourself, like, mini goals, or a sense of, okay, I'm going to be researching this long, and then I'm going to be writing the first draft this long, or anything like that?
Megan Kate Nelson 36:29
Yeah, a little bit. I should be more organized, like I should, I should be more targeted. I have tried to make big, you know, print out months, calendars and do all that kind of stuff, and I'll abide by it for like, a couple days, and then I'll just, I'll just give it up. I don't know, I don't know what my problem is, but for The Westerners, I think I was just thinking, Okay, once I really turn my attention from promoting Saving Yellowstone to actually researching and writing The Westerners, I'll just kind of start and go, and once I feel like I've got enough to start writing, then I will start writing. And that's a very fluid, often frustrating kind of thing, but, but I go into it thinking revisions are just part of the process, and also because I show chapters to various writing groups, and if they, like, Book Squad just completely rejected the first couple chapters and that structure, then I kind of go back to the drawing board, and I open some new files and say, Okay, how can I do this somewhat differently? And I think I began writing fairly soon after researching for The Westerners, because I knew I had a lot to do. So the due date was sort of in the back of my mind for a lot of it, and I just kind of kept going on it. So I did not have any targets. I did not have any kind of internally imposed due dates, although I probably should have. I know it works for a lot of people, and it just, I don't know why it doesn't work for me. It's like a very weird thing. I mean, I am pretty self motivated, so I do work on the project every day. It's not like I'm just sitting around watching Netflix, although some days I am just kind of like, well, I'm tired. I'm not gonna work on it today. But it is one of those kind of byproducts also, of this being often the only thing I'm working on. So my day is structured however I want to structure it, which you know is a lot of flexibility, but it can also be too much flexibility sometimes.
Kate Carpenter 38:49
Sure. I want to talk a little bit about when and how you get feedback. So it sounds like you share with writing groups early on in the process, and you sound super chill now, with the benefit of hindsight, talking about, like, presenting something and book squad being like, No thank you. This is not working, and you go back to the drawing board. Do you feel that chill about it in the moment, or are you like, oh my gosh, I'm never gonna figure this out?
Megan Kate Nelson 39:15
I mean, when people say, like, no, like, I really don't like this, this is not doing it for me. That's always, that's always a little bit of a blow. You know, you're kind of like, oh, oh, okay. And, I mean, there's some criticism that you take fully on board, and then there's some criticism… Like, I do have a, I have a write a group called the Classified Writers, a group that has five people in it, and notoriously, two of them are pretty academically inclined, and so they usually are very uncomfortable with my early drafts, which tend to be very close to the ground and very detailed and not foregrounding argument. And they always want me to foreground the argument, and I'm always like, I'm not going to do that. But thank you for providing, like, a lovely little sort of habitual thing where I'm like, I know they're going to say this, and it's sort of like, oh, you're there with the comment again, although they are often giving other comments too that are really super helpful about certain elements they want to hear more about, or if I leave a topic too quickly, things like that. So yeah, I mean you, I have a pretty, like, thick skin when it comes to critique. And I show people things on purpose, like I showed my Civil War chapters to I have a group of really good friends who are all Civil War historians. And so we met for a little while, for a stretch of about a year, doing some workshop type things. And so I showed them, you know, I didn't show them other stuff, because I was like, you don't, you don't need to weigh in on on these other issues, but because their area of expertise is Civil War, I wanted to make sure that the Civil War chapters were working. And I also gave them the prologue, whatever that version, I think I wrote maybe 60 versions of the prologue. I mean, it's just insane. I showed it to everybody, mostly because, you know, no matter who you are, the prologue should be able to speak to you right, no matter what your expertise. And so I showed that to my fellow fellows at the Huntington also, because, you know, they were coming from Art History and English and medieval and Shakespearean. And I was like, Well, I think the most helpful thing would be to show you the prologue, because, and here are the things that need to happen, but many of them, I mean, well, all of them are academics, and so a lot of them were very uncomfortable with that prologue also. So they were like, I need you to just lay out the argument in the beginning and then lay out the structure of the book. And I was like, that's not how trade prologues work, so I can't do that, but I hear you that you want to hear more about this. You know, it's sort of that kind of thing. You have to be you have to kind of know why you're giving a group of readers something like I gave you the manuscript specifically so you would read for narrative, voice and readability, right? Because I said you don't necessarily need to weigh in on issues of historiography or background. I mean, if you want to, you can, but really, you know, you were kind of my reader for narrative flow. And then I had another reader who is a US Western history specialist, so she was reading for that and for women's history stuff. So, you know, I think you have to identify when you have a writing group, you know, it can't just be random. It has to be people who you feel like you are in community with for certain reasons. And so you will show them something that you think they will be able to help you with. Does that make sense?
Kate Carpenter 43:01
Okay, so you have, in addition to book groups and sort of friends and periodic things, you ask a couple of people, as you've you've just alluded to, when the manuscript is finished, at the same time as you send it to your editor, if I'm not mistaken, right?
Megan Kate Nelson 43:17
Yes, yes.
Kate Carpenter 43:18
One of those people was me, which was a great privilege and fun and also scary. What do you then do with all that revision? You get kind of these three, at least, big, sort of full book perspectives back, what then?
Megan Kate Nelson 43:33
So it depends on the sort of granularity of the comments. Usually I go through and do a first revision pass, if, like, I think you were also marking just because you couldn't help yourself, which I completely understand, you were marking kind of grammatical things and, like, all this stuff. So I go through then and fix all of that, and then, depending on kind of what the larger issues are, you know, like you and my editor were both like, this Civil War chapter needs to be cut in half because it's just, yeah, it's too indulgent. And I totally understand that, because I was like…
Kate Carpenter 44:12
I did not use the word indulgent.
Megan Kate Nelson 44:14
I don't think you did, but I believe my editor did. And okay, yeah, she was just like, this is just going on for two and I was like, I know, but he just has so much fun stuff to say, and all this and and both of you were like, the pacing is just off. It's like, twice as long as the chapters before it like, there's no, and I was like, Okay. So, so I went in and I cut that. I literally cut that chapter in half and really super streamlined it. And actually, I mean, I think it was, it was a great comment from both of you, and I think it works better with the book overall. And I don't know if, I don't think I sent it back to you for you to do a read on it. Did I? No, I think I just kind of did that revision pass and was like, Okay, I've cut it in half. And my editor was like, woo hoo. And I think you probably were too. You're like, Oh, thank God. I don't want to have to read about this anymore. But I think it also is helpful, because I do like to, because these, the three books that I've done now with Scribner, are a little bit in conversation with one another. I think they're actually quite complimentary. So, yeah, buy all three in like a three pack, yeah. But there are some Easter eggs for readers of Three Cornered and of Saving Yellowstone. There are some of them are a little bit longer explanations. Some are just kind of references you'll see, you'll be like, Oh, I've read about that person before. And then you'll gain a little bit of insight. And in in Three Cornered, you see the Battle of Apache Canyon and Glorietta pass from the Confederate side. And then this one, you see it from the US Army side. So those two should be complimentary, but yeah, I cut, that was the biggest change I think I made was to the manuscript where I just really sliced and diced a chapter. I think the rest of it, there were segments that I cut out. There was a big segment on Buffalo Bill's Wild West show that I think both you and my editor were like, Why is this here? And I think my other reader did too, was sort of like, this seems totally random, but, you know, again, it's one of these things where you run across a source and the source is just so good, and you're like, Oh, this is great. Like, this will be great way to open the chapter. And then it turns out it's not so great. So let's just, let's just delete that and do something else with it. So usually what I was doing was going along. And if there were any big chunks like that to take out, then I would start revising those. And then once my editor sent me her responses, I'd kind of go through and be like, okay, Have I already addressed this? Have I already done this? And my other reader, Gingy Scharf, who is an expert in US Women's History, and US Western women's history, and the West more broadly, she sent me, kind of written comments and in a sort of broader suite, and she has done work on Sacagawea, so she was really focusing on that part, and then also on Ella Watson, because she is also an expert in Wyoming history and so, and this is, you know, why I wanted her. And so she had a lot of good kind of suggestions about books to read and some other kind of ideas to bring in that, you know, I had sort of been talking about Ella Watson a little bit in a bubble. And she was like, look, women in the West have been raising cattle and animals for forever. I mean, this is an indigenous practice. And I was like, Oh, my God, that's right. And so, you know, going back in and making those kinds of changes that really made the book better and stronger, and I think also tighter in the end, because I have no problem cutting words. I'm not one of those people who's like, every word is precious. I cannot get rid of it. It is my baby. I'm like, I'm like, a serial killer. I am like, get in there and just kill those darlings, all of them, because there's a greater goal, which is to make the book more readable, to make the narrative pacing better, and to and to really think about the reader. And this is, this is why I think these kinds of comments are so valuable, and writing workshops are so valuable, because they really do bring the reader into your life before the book is published, right, and and this, I think, is one of the major differences between writing more kind of argument forward books and more narrative focused books, is that they're, when you're writing only for argument, it's all about you, right? It's your argument. It's an argument you're making. It's an intervention you are making. This book is going to make my mark in the field, and when you're writing trade history, it's almost all about the reader. What is the reader going to learn from this book? How is the reader going to experience this book from page one to page 350? Is the reader going to find this a really good read? Do I need to give the reader a break? So one of the things I did do there was a big, chunky chapter on Sand Creek that involved both the description of the massacre at Sand Creek and then also the US Army investigation into that action and taking the testimony of people who participated, including Jim Beckwourth, because, of course he was there and doing horrible things. And so when I was revising, I had reread the Sand Creek part of that chapter, and I was like, You know what? I think I need to divide this in two, because this is really intense and very upsetting. And I think that readers are going to need to just set it down. And if I give them a good way to do that, by having a chapter break, then I've just helped them do that. And I again, I called my editor, and I was like, I'm thinking of doing this. And she was like, that sounds great. Go ahead and do that. She never complains about short chapters. This is a, she complains about long chapters, which is, you know, like this is going on for way too long. Cut this down, but it's a very kind of readerly approach. And I think writing workshops do that too, because you're you're kind of dealing with reader response before you're even really maybe ready for it. But I think it's good to get it early and often.
Kate Carpenter 50:42
Fantastic, so okay, you have at this point in our journey, a manuscript, and let's fast forward a little bit through sort of like revisions and page proofs and everything. I want to talk about title and cover, for the sake, for the sake of listeners who, like me, who have never published and been through these discussions, but I also got to sort of see the behind the scenes of these debates, and I want to talk about them because they're really interesting. So if you heard my first interview with Megan, you heard her talk about a book called The Westerners, and now we are talking about that book. And on the surface, that seems like a lovely story of her coming up with a great title that then made it all the way through. But that was not the case. What happened with the title? Give people the short like version of title drama.
Megan Kate Nelson 51:24
This is another thing where you just have to be, and I think in university press publishing too, because my titles for those books changed also. You know, because a title, we get very emotionally attached to our titles. And I think what is hard to understand when you go into publishing a book is that for them, the title is marketing. The title is not about you. It's not about your hopes and dreams. It is marketing. So I had always thought that The Westerners should be the title just because I thought it was a great title. Plus, I thought that it really represented that kind of push I was making against David McCullough's book The Pioneers, which I felt, and a lot of historians felt, was just reiterating Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier myth, as if 40 years of historiography had not happened, and academic historians and other scholars had not exploded this frontier myth already. So I thought, okay, well, instead of calling them pioneers, we'll call them Westerners, and it's a much more capacious term. And I thought, Oh, that's a, every time I told people the title, they'd be like, Ooh, cool title. So initially the proposal was, and so this is the title in the contract, is The Westerners: The True Pioneers Who Built a Region and Defined a Nation. Which is, you know, whatever. I go into these and just assume the title is going to change. But I really was attached to The Westerners, so I assumed the secondary title would change. I wanted the secondary title to change because I didn't like that title. So I was like, but it's, it'll do for now, right? So then, as submitted, it was called The Westerners, I think it was something like A History of America's Most Iconic Region. Then I got, I was still in Los Angeles, so this was probably maybe May. It was a couple months after I had submitted, and my editor was kind of moving through revisions, or maybe I was in revision stage, and she called me and she said, there's some pushback on the title. And I was like, Oh, well, we can change the secondary title. That's not a big deal. And then she said, No on The Westerners. And I was like, I was like, why? Like, I thought everyone loved the title in the proposal. That was like, part of the reason they bought the book was because the title was so good. And she said, I thought so too. But there had been a there had been a switch in the role of publisher, and the new publisher, she said was not a fan. And so I was like, okay, okay. And by that point, the argument of the book had sort of changed initially, like one of the big points was going to be, like, Westerners, not pioneers, right? That has kind of dropped out a little bit. And now the the argument is more as I explained it in the beginning, which is that all of these people are building the West and then, like simultaneously being erased from the national story of the West. So I did the whole I, you know, was pretty mad about it, and I was a little tempery and, but then I got over it a little bit. But then I did, I took a bunch of cards, and I did this trick I had heard about it, I think, with the creation of Julia Child's cookbook, The Art of French Cooking, and how her editor had come up with that title, which is that she just put all the keywords on cards. And then, like, move them around on a bulletin board. So I did that on my kitchen table, and I took all of the words that I felt were really significant for the book, and then I kind of moved them all around. And that's how I came up with the new secondary title, which was Myth Making and Belonging on the American Frontier. And then I sort of pitched, I was still tempery about The Westerners. And I pitched a phrase that had been used to describe Jim Beckwourth, which was that his reputation was as wide as the West itself. So I said, How about As Wide as the West Itself? And so she took that, and she took that to them. And while we were waiting for a response, I was just like, You know what? I'm gonna fight for The Westerners. And I called my agent, and I was like, I'm gonna fight for it. I was like, if the new, you know, publisher wants to call me, I will explain to her what my thinking is. I will explain why this is a great title. And so my agent was like, fine, go ahead. I think you don't make too many waves. So I think if this is a hill, you know, you feel comfortable dying on, or want to die on, then do it. And I was like, Okay. And so I called my editor, and I said that. And I said, I want it to be The Westerners: Myth Making and Belonging on the American Frontier. And she said, Okay, I will take that to them. I will take it to the art department. And I was like, because that, that's just a really long front title and, and, you know, I mean, Kate, like, you have to think, I'm sure that you get some books, and you're like, how am I going to say that title in a podcast? Right?
Kate Carpenter 51:25
It's true.
Megan Kate Nelson 51:25
I mean, this is one of the things I'm like, I think about, you know, creating titles that are easy to pronounce and and don't make you trip over your… I think maybe there was one. I think I sent this to you too, because I was running titles by you, and you were giving suggestions and everything. I think one of them was like, Whose West, or something like that. And it would, I was just like, how is anyone gonna know what that like, if you actually are saying in a radio show, like, Whose West, like, everyone's like, wait what? Especially since, like, it could be whose, or it could be who, apostrophe s, look, who is the West?
Kate Carpenter 54:03
It's like a comedy routine waiting to happen.
Megan Kate Nelson 57:08
And so I was thinking about that too, and I was like, it's just too long. That front title is too long. And then she my editor came back to me and was like, they love the new combination. So it was a matter of, kind of the Westerners and I kind of agree, like there was some mismatch between the the first title and the secondary that got resolved when I put together the secondary title. So I felt good about that whole process, even though, at the beginning I was, I was pretty stabby about it, but like, I feel like what it generated was a good title that I can really love, and is that is good at marketing. Like, it tells you where the book takes place. It tells you exactly the kind of myth making and belonging these two very important segments of the book. And, you know, I also got to keep The Westerners, yes, and that. And that also meant that we could keep part of the cover design, which was already in process, which there is a visual image on the front in green and yellow. It's a landscape painting from the 19th century. So it's, it's kind of visually consonant with the Three Cornered War and Saving Yellowstone. Again, if you look at all three, they're like a package deal. They look like siblings. And then on the spine, it kind of, it kind of turns the corner from the spine onto the cover of the book. But it's four of the protagonists. It's Sacagawea, Ovando Hollister, Jim Beckwourth, and Polly Bemis and they are on the spine of the book, and then they also turn the corner and like that just really appealed to me for a bunch of different reasons. And to be able to have individuals there. I didn't want the individuals necessarily all being on the cover of the book. I don't like those types of designs usually. And there are seven people, so we had to choose four, but and we had to switch out the initial image they had for Sacagawea, because, of course, we don't know what she looked like. So all of the images have been based, really on one sculpture that that was made in 1904 and then everything that came after has been kind of on that model. But the I don't know where this image came from, but the first one that had been designed for her just looked like Cher from the 70s. And I was like, I can't I can't unsee it. I can't unsee Cher. Like, we have to go and find an image where she is very obviously indigenous and not, not Cher. So we did find another, another image from, I think it's from a mural actually, in the Montana Statehouse, and it's a picture of her, and she's looking fierce, and a really just sort of strong image. And that was much better. But the color story, I think, is really good, and it works well with the title.
Kate Carpenter 1:00:02
Hey listeners, we're going to take a quick break, but stick with us after the break. Megan's giving us a tour of failed book proposals, something I don't think we've ever talked about on the show. And stick with us to the end, because we're dropping a big announcement. We'll be right back.
Kate Carpenter 1:00:19
Okay, so gosh, I want to talk about how you're promoting the book, but first I want to talk about what comes next, because in the timeline of your life, that's how it proceeds, which I think might be surprising to some listeners, right, that you already sort of start working on the next project before one is even out. So you mentioned to me, first of all, we know what your next project is. I'm going to read the description from the book deal in Publishers Marketplace. Hopefully this doesn't get me in trouble. I think it'll be okay. I think it's okay. And it says, so, it talks about the sale of "Megan Kate Nelson's On the Edge of Freedom: Slavery, Captivity and Conquest in Civil War Texas, following two intertwined families in Civil War Texas, one Black, one white, as they are swept up into a violent collision of slavery, indigenous captivity and conquest that reveals how the war transformed the American West." Oh, it's gonna be so good. I want to talk though, because I know from chatting with you and you also mentioned to me, when the announcement came out that you wished you could, sort of tell people that it is not just a magical thing where you are like, Okay, I finished one book. Here's my next book. Let's go. You had a bunch of failed proposals before you hit this one. Talk to me about that. I mean, you don't. You can tell me some of them if you want to. Oh, yeah, you don't have to. But just even that process, what's that like?
Megan Kate Nelson 1:01:40
There were five, Kate. There were five failed proposals, and they each made it to a certain kind of, you know, height in the high jump, and then knocked over the bar and didn't make it. So, yeah, basically, what happens is, when you submit the manuscript, you've got a little bit of time. So I had time before, you know you and Gingy gave me back comments. I had time before my editor was going to give me back revisions. And so I spent that time, I was still in Los Angeles, I was still on fellowship, so I spent that time thinking about what I would want to write next, because my agent's always like, Okay, what's next? And because she likes to kind of sign deals on that particular chronology and that timing, kind of sign up the deal before the next book comes out. So the first one, and I went back to look at this, because I was like, How many were there? Like, I sort of forgot, and there were five. And the first one, I was like, Oh, I almost kind of forgot about this one. It was going to be called To Preserve the Works of Man, and it was going to be a history of the various communities who came together to promote and then lobby for the passage of the Antiquities Act. So it was going to be set, kind of, in Mesa Verde and other archeological and indigenous sites of the Southwest. It was going to involve women's clubs and scientists and looters and all kinds of other people, and of course, Teddy Roosevelt and that, I wrote a whole proposal. I think I wrote a fairly complete proposal for that, and that got kind of rejected at the agent level. Because I think a big, a big part of it was to say, like this, the Antiquities Act is an extremely important piece of legislation that not many people know about. And she was kind of like, well, do people really want to know about it? And I was like, Well, you know, I mean, we hadn't really seen yet what the Trump administration was going to try to do to all of these sites. So I think that was part of it. The timing was not quite right on that one. And then I was like, Well, what about more Teddy Roosevelt in the West type stuff? I thought about maybe pitching a book about his tour of the West, where he ended up kind of opening Yellowstone National Park. And this is why there's the Roosevelt Arch. And it confuses everyone, because they think Roosevelt created the park when he really didn't. But that didn't get I didn't even write that one because I some of these things. I sort of pitched the basic idea, and my agents like, no, and then I don't follow it up. That was the same for, I had a worker's history of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. So like, who are all the people actually laboring to put that show together? And she was like, no, not interested. And then I wrote a kind of mini proposal for a book about 1893 which would begin in Hawaii. So I was like, Ooh, I could go to Hawaii and then go to the World's Fair, and then the fight for women's rights in Colorado. And again, that failed at the agent stage. And then my agent suggested something more like a history of the United States in like 12 places. And so I started thinking about that, and I kind of started working stuff up. But I was, I was walking around my house, like, just thinking about working on that book and just doing this [sighs deeply]. It was a very heavy sigh. And I was like,
Kate Carpenter 1:05:10
Not a good sign.
Megan Kate Nelson 1:05:11
I was like, that's not a good sigh. So I basically, like, called her up, and I was like, I'm not doing that book. And it was actually a good thing, because Beverly Gage has a book coming out that is very similar to that, and that book is coming out in April. So I would have been scooped by her anyway, by the same press too, by Simon and Schuster, basically. So that was a good decision, I think. So I killed that one. And that often happens, like, sometimes you think about a book project and you kill it yourself, because you're like, This is not working, or like, I just don't want to do it, you know, like, I just don't want to spend the time with this particular thing. And then there was the book Notorious, which was about a con man in the West named Soapy Smith, who Kate had already heard of, which I found remarkable.
Kate Carpenter 1:05:57
I was so excited.
Megan Kate Nelson 1:05:59
I know we were going to go to Alaska together. We were going to go and, like, do some research.
Kate Carpenter 1:06:04
The trip that will never be.
Megan Kate Nelson 1:06:06
We'll find another reason to go. We'll find, I feel like maybe that would be a good pitched article. I feel like that would be where the hook would be, because Soapy Smith was this guy. He basically ran a criminal organization in Denver, and then he ended up in Skagway, Alaska, where he was in a shootout and died on the docks in Skagway, which is now a major stop on cruise ships that are going up the kind of inner passage and northern parts of Alaska. So they do a reenactment of this shootout and his death every year. And I, you know, I found him through his his morgue photograph from his Alaska morgue photograph. So I, you know, you could start the article there and then be talking about, like, why do we do these things? What is this? This is so weird. But yeah, if I pitch that and like, actually get paid to write that article. We'll go on our we'll do our Alaska cruise. Kate, you can do it. Yeah. So that was sad. I was super psyched about that. I wrote a full proposal for that. I convinced my agent, who was very apprehensive. She was like, Okay. And I was like, Look, I just need you to take this to her, because I just need, I need to not have a total failure once again and and I don't know. So then it went to her, and she pitched it to the folks at Scribner, and then they said, No. I think part of the reason for that is what I was thinking of doing was like doing another Western story, but later in the 19th century. So like, a gilded age, progressive era, type of book, and they were like, that's just not, the market for that is just not there. I think if he had been a con man in San Francisco or New York, it may have been a maybe more successful, I don't know, but what they did do is they came back with a very helpful note for me, which was, Do you have anything else on the Civil War? And I had not really thought about going back to Civil War history, because I was like, Well, what would I really do? But I had had this conversation with a friend who teaches at SMU, and he had taught Three Cornered War in a history of Texas class, and he said, when I zoomed into his class, and he said, you know, you might be surprised, I'm teaching Three Cornered, because there's not much Texas in that book. Like the army is in the, you know, the army that comes from Texas is in the first part of that book, and then they're gone, they're defeated, and they've gone back to San Antonio, so, like, they're not in the book anymore. And he said, Well, the reason for that is that I really couldn't find a really good, compelling book on Civil War Texas. And I was like, oh. And so when my editor came back with that note, I just said to my agent, well, how about a book on Civil War Texas? And she was just like, Ah, yes. And you always know that's always a good reaction from an agent to a verbal pitch. Like they're just like, Oh, okay. Like, if they can immediately see it, and if they immediately get excited, then they know, even just from those, those three little words, Civil War Texas. So then I started looking around, and I really wanted this next book to be, I wanted it to have multiple communities in it. I wanted it to engage, because I had never written about Black enslavement in the West. And so I was like, well, Texas is the place to do it, right? I mean, they do have, by the time of the Civil War, pretty well established plantation slavery, especially in East Texas, and then enslaved men and women working in a variety of of jobs and other places. And I was like, there could be a component where it's, you know, Mexican and Mexican Americans in Texas, and then also Indigenous people. Because really, at the point of the Civil War, half of Texas was still Comancheria and Apacheria, like there, this was not like the Texas we know today. So so yeah, so I just started to do some research on that, and what emerged from that was this story of a Kiowa and Comanche raid on a biracial ranching community in North Texas in the fall of 1864, and kind of following the captives, who were both Black and white, mostly women and children, following them with the Kiowa and Comanche for about a year, and then also the husband of one of the captives, a Black man named Brick Johnson, who followed them, who tracked them, and ultimately negotiated for their release. So all of this is happening kind of in the last year of the war. It's all happening in Texas and the Texas Borderlands, the northern Borderlands of Texas, and it really shows us, and what I really like, which I always like, which is a new, totally new angle, kind of a vision on Civil War history and, you know, yet again, another place people don't usually think about. So, yeah, so I've started researching that already. I'm doing that while promoting The Westerners, which can get a little bit weird. It feels a little bit like, whoa. Oh. So if I start talking about Texas accidentally in the middle of the middle of discussion of The Westerners, where there's not much Texas, that might happen.
Megan Kate Nelson 1:06:52
I want to talk about promotion, but I do want to ask, I'm always really interested in both how you think about books that you want to do and also how your agent does. Because I think even as you talk about all these ideas, like, I can imagine all these books, I can even think of presses that I think would love to publish them. So it's not that they're not books, right, but that they're not necessarily like trade press books. They're not necessarily, sometimes you you talk with your agent, I know, about kind of your brand, for lack of a less crass way to put it, but like, what kind of historian are you? How do you and she think about those things when you're talking about what book to do next?
Megan Kate Nelson 1:09:52
Yeah. I mean, it's a really tricky thing, because the book market is bizarre. It's a very weird thing. And there's, there's been a lot of conversation about the decline in history nonfiction reading and purchasing in recent years. I mean, I think through the pandemic, people were looking for more immersive fiction, you know, they didn't want necessarily, these kind of dark histories, which, you know, I think most histories written by serious scholars have a darkness to them, because that's the reality of the past, right? And there's a sense in which you want to speak to current events, but you also don't want to speak so closely to current events that it dates the book. So I was actually very careful in The Westerners, there is a, there are some references in the epilogue to these kinds of practices on the part of the federal government going on today. But I felt, I was like, I am not going to name the administration or the president, because then I will have to have Trump in my index, and I will not do it. And I also didn't want it to, again, to really date it, you know, in the hope that people could read this book for many more years and not feel like it was just pinned to one particular event. Because, you know, I'm not a political scientist. That's not kind of the thing, and I'm not a political essayist, but all of these historical events do have resonance today, contemporary resonance, so sometimes that can be helpful to say people are interested in in this, and sometimes the editorial will buy that, and sometimes they won't. Like they were, I was like, but everyone loves the show the Gilded Age, and they were just like, not enough people. So I mean, I think they have a lot of data, and my agent has a lot of data on on books like, like, dependable markets. And I think one of those dependable markets is Civil War, and I think that's one of the reasons they bought Three Cornered in the first place, was because they knew there's this large pool of Civil War readers who actually buy books. Because that's the other thing too. Like, you can have a lot of I mean, people are reading now more than ever, because we read all the time. We're reading our phones constantly, right? But how does that shift from reading on a device to actually buying a brick and mortar book, or buying the audio book version of that, or the ebook version of that? Like, how do you appeal to people? And you know, I am not yet a known name. I'm not yet a David McCullough or a David Grann or Erik Larson, authors of history nonfiction, where people will buy the book just because it's, it's by them, like and they're you always know when you've turned that corner, when your name is bigger than the title. Yes, it really doesn't matter what the book is about, people will buy it and it will be on the bestseller list, right? I'm not there yet, like, I'm a, I'm a solid mid list author for Scribner, which is, you know, a very well regarded imprint within Simon and Schuster, where a lot of the authors win awards. They, you know, make long lists, like they're part of a cultural conversation, but maybe they're not on the best seller list, but they still want to make, they're in the business of making money. They're not a non profit. So, you know, they want to know that there is a market there. I mean, I think both my agent and my editor and the people at Scribner, they believe in my writing. So that's not the issue. It's just a matter of what kind of historical story will captivate readers who are interested generally in history, and then also have a kind of pool of readers. I mean, there are a lot of people interested in Texas history. I think some someone said at one point to me, like, you know, it's if a book is about New York City, you're like, halfway there in the pitch, right? Like, and, and when I first pitched Ruin Nation, actually, to University of Georgia Press, they were like, you had me at Civil War. You don't even need to go on. I don't even care what it's about, as long as it's about the Civil War, we can sell it, right.? Because that is a really dependable it's a dependable university audience, because there are, I mean, hopefully always going to be classes in Civil War history, they will always be filled. I have a lot of connections in that world because of my previous work. So but still, I mean, overall the market. I mean, who knows it's that's, that's the crazy part, and that's why, that's sort of why I didn't want to write the 12 places book too. I was like, I don't want to write a book for the market, because who knows what the market is going to do. I want to, I want to write a book that makes sense for me. You know, that makes sense, kind of in that, if you look at a shelf of my books, right? Like, okay, this makes sense. It's not just like, Oh, I've written some total outlier, like, some book on, like, 20th century. I don't even know what, sports, you know. People would be like. Why is this here? What like? Who are you like? It might be an interest of mine. I'm obsessed with the Olympics. So, like, you know, I would love to write a book on the Olympics. Does that make sense for me as an author? No, it makes zero sense. So, you know, there are people who can do that, who are mostly their essayists. Like, they're mostly like someone like Malcolm Gladwell, can write about whatever he wants, but like, I want to do research that is meaningful to me, but I also want to write a good story that people will find compelling and also informative. Like, the best, the best compliments I ever get are when people are like, I really learned a lot from this book, and it was a really good read like that. That's to me, like those two things are what I what I'm going for. So I want to write a book with those goals in mind, and I want to enjoy the process also. I mean, doesn't it means I'm not going to Alaska, Kate, which is very sad for me, I'm going to Texas instead. Yeah, Texas instead.
Kate Carpenter 1:11:01
It's warmer.
Megan Kate Nelson 1:11:01
And I, and I am planning to go probably a year from now. I've been told that this is the time like, this is the time to go to Texas when it is not a million degrees, and you are also kind of, I think, a little bit past the ice storm season. So we'll see. We'll see.
Kate Carpenter 1:11:18
So I want to talk a little bit about promotion of The Westerners. I think, I hope at this point, listeners of this podcast realize that for many authors, the author is the one doing much of the promotion. But I think there's still sometimes confusion when it comes to trade presses. There's sort of this belief that once you hit sort of a trade press, buckets of money rain down on you for marketing publicity, and they send you on a multi state book tour. That is not the case. I'm sorry to dispel that dream out there, but talk to me about what it is like for you. You know, what's the what's the balance of sort of what you're doing and what the press is doing and how you work together to promote a book like The Westerners?
Megan Kate Nelson 1:09:06
Yeah. I mean, it is. It is really fun. It's fun to be in this stage of the process. I have a publicity person at Scribner who is assigned to me and to the book, and she does pitches to newspapers. So she goes in and she's got a couple other books also. So she'll pitch multiple books at the same time, but she'll pitch like pitch the New York Times Book Review. She will pitch various media outlets. They will pitch NPR. They will do that, sometimes in person, and then sometimes by sending out mailers and press kits and follow up with phone calls, especially if they know people, if they are personally connected with people like production assistants or booking people and various media outlets. So that's her job, and she also because she's listed as the publicity contact, she will field some inquiries for me, like, especially from podcasters or people who want to do an event with me, will contact her first, and then she tells me about it and says, Do you want me to set you up with them? And the answer to that is almost always yes, because they're always legitimate and really lovely inquiries. The marketing people do more of the ad placements, if there are any, social media. Scribner has gotten much better at this than the last three years since Saving Yellowstone. So I just recently went down to New York and filmed about an hour of answers to questions, some like the ones you've been asking me and some other ones, including, you know, my writing hot takes. And then they edit those into 20 second clips, and they will be posting them in the run up to the to the book. So you will be seeing those, because I will be reposting them as they come. And hopefully I didn't look like too much of an insane person. But they do those. They do they create all the social media assets. So anytime I post anything to bluesky or to Instagram where there's a blurb or any other kind of thing, they'll at a certain point give a list of the events that I'm going to, which is sort of a book tour, but not in the traditional sense. You know, as you alluded to, you know, really only Stephen King and Colleen Hoover and those people do book tours anymore, and even those people probably don't, because they're way too famous, and they would be insane. There were the crowds to see them would just be overwhelming. But what I generally do, like, I'm pretty much in charge of the book tour, and that's a combination of universities who reach out and ask me to do a named lecture, and then I will usually go, go there, and I will do the lecture, and then I will do some class visits, and then maybe in coordination with that, I will do a radio interview, or a podcast interview with a local station, or, you know, I was just in Montana, at Montana State and the center they have there, the Ivan Doig Center has a podcast. So we did a podcast interview as part of that visit. And those are lovely because they, you know, they invite you to do these things, and it's a named lecture, and it's in the public and so people can come and do this. So part of that is an inquiry. Part of that is pitching. Sometimes I'll pitch institutions either that I've been to before, or institutions I want to go to, and I'll pitch them a lecture and some other things. And then, usually I build around it some bookstore events and then some literary festival events. So I'm going to the Tucson Festival of Books, which is going to be super fun, but I have a couple, I have a couple literary festivals, and because I'm going to be there for that, I've got a couple other I usually build either a bookstore visit or sometimes a class visit in with those. I have a really fun-- I got asked to go to the Gaithersburg, Maryland Literary Festival in May, and one of my former students from way back in the day, who was a high school student of mine, is a college counselor now at a private high school, a Quaker high school in Maryland, and we had been in touch because he was like, We want you to come and give a talk. And I don't I we were been in touch for some other reason. And I said, Well, you know, I'm coming to this festival, and it doesn't look like it's that far from your school, like, are you still going to be in session? And he said, Yes. And so it's been kind of a long negotiation process, but now I am going, I'm going down there a couple days in advance, and I'm going to go to the school, I'm going to give a public talk, and then I'm going to, like, have some sessions with the students on writing and on history and how to do research and things like that.
Megan Kate Nelson 1:24:28
So that will be super, super fun. But yeah, so I'm definitely in charge of that, sure, but publicity does all of the kind of outreach to media, and then marketing is more of all those kinds of reaching out to book clubs, and they also send out mailers and things like that. But it's a slightly different job. But you are still as the author, you're in control of a lot of things, and so you really do, the hustle on that is required.
Kate Carpenter 1:25:05
How long will you spend sort of immersed in book publicity? Where, I realize you're always and forever promoting your books, but you know, is there kind of a window of time where you're like, Okay, what I'm doing right now is promoting The Westerners, particularly before you get back to really doing research and working on the next book?
Megan Kate Nelson 1:25:21
Yeah, this one, I mean, usually it is the six weeks run up, which we are in right now, six weeks run up to the book, and then usually publicity and marketing at Scribner will do stuff for me for a couple weeks after that. I've got talks and various things on The Westerners through the fall. And part of the reason for that is that it is, in addition to America 250, which I've gotten some invitations related to that because of the frontier myth, which I think is great, but it's also the Colorado 150 because they're the Centennial State. So that's August. So I'm going out for a literary festival in May to Crested Butte, but then I'm going to go back in late August, early September, and do a bunch of a kind of cluster of events with the Pioneers Museum in Colorado Springs, and then Colorado College, and then the public library system of Colorado Springs, and we will probably then build some Denver bookstore events around that too, because they're far enough apart that they can be they'll be separate, separate audiences. So I will continue to kind of do events, probably through the fall, but I will be continuously like today, when, when, you know, we sign off on this podcast, I will go and and do some reading for the new project, for the Civil War Texas project. So you know, there are PowerPoints to build and talks to create, and some prep work to do for podcasts and things like that. But for the most part, the promotion work is a little bit of prep and then a lot of logistics. But I have a lot of time in airports and a lot of time in airplanes, which is some of my favorite time. So I do, I'll be doing research kind of throughout, but I'll really turn toward research trips for that book in the fall and then later also in the winter.
Kate Carpenter 1:27:24
So we know what your next book is about. But you've also been working on another big project.
Megan Kate Nelson 1:27:31
I have, and I have been working on it with you.
Kate Carpenter 1:27:34
Yes, and we want to give listeners a little bit of a sneak peek of what we've been working on. So for a pretty long time, I have dreamed of growing Drafting the Past into something kind of beyond just a podcast, something that does more to celebrate and highlight great history writing. So about a year ago, Megan and I started talking about what it might look like to do something together.
Megan Kate Nelson 1:27:55
That is correct, and we agreed that there weren't really enough really good, engaging reviews of history books out there in newspapers and magazines. And then over the last six months, many of these sites began to reduce or eliminate their book review sections, which was a terrible development. But Kate and I believe that compelling history matters and compelling history writing matters, and it deserves a place where scholars and critics can talk about new books and maybe even some classics as well, and really take them seriously.
Kate Carpenter 1:28:35
Yeah, absolutely. And also a place where people who love reading history books can find them, can find good ones, and can even talk with each other about them. And we also want to be a place where people writing history can turn for inspiration and ideas. So this fall, the fall of 2026, Drafting the Past will be expanding. You can think of it kind of as a home for people who love reading and writing history books. The podcast is not going anywhere. I'll keep recording and releasing episodes just like this, where I interview authors about the craft of writing history like you know and love already.
Megan Kate Nelson 1:29:11
And in addition to hosting the podcast, our new website will also publish weekly book reviews and features about books and the book publishing process, these pieces will be smart and fun and also serious about history writing at a time when it's actually kind of difficult to tell who is an expert and who is not, we will publish reviews by scholars and writers you can trust.
Kate Carpenter 1:29:39
Absolutely. Also, of course, that doesn't mean we'll only publish reviews and features by tenured professors or about tenured professors at big schools or just best selling authors. Our goal is to continue to bring together a diverse community of historians and people working on history in all times and places, and we will be paying writers for their work.
Megan Kate Nelson 1:29:58
So, if you would like to be a future reviewer for Drafting the Past, please contact us.
Kate Carpenter
Yes, we're putting together a, Rolodex, whatever a Rolodex is these days. And we'd also love to hear what you think, what your feedback is, and what you'd like to see on this kind of site. So feel free to send me an email, it's kate@draftingthepast.com, with any thoughts.
Megan Kate Nelson
In the meantime, Kate and I hope that you are as excited as we are about this new direction that Drafting the Past is taking, and we hope that you will join us in this new community that is centered around history worth reading.
Kate Carpenter
Dr. Megan Kate Nelson, I'm so glad that I had you on as my first guest four years ago, and I'm even more glad that you're back for this return visit. Congratulations on The Westerners, it's so exciting to see it come to fruition.
Megan Kate Nelson
Thank you so much! I'm doing my dance again, for everyone who can't see. I'm doing my excited dance. Yes, I'm always very proud, I always say, you know, I was Kate's first guest on Drafting that Past. Yes, so it's very exciting.
Kate Carpenter
You can't take that away.
Megan Kate Nelson
I know, it's very exciting to be the first return guest, and to get to talk about the whole process from idea to book, because it's not something that we talk about all that often.
Kate Carpenter
It's true. Thank you for being willing, it's generous and I think listeners--I certainly appreciate it quite a bit. Alright, thank you.
Megan Kate Nelson
Thank you! See you later.
Kate Carpenter
Thanks again to Dr. Megan Kate Nelson for returning to Drafting the Past, and thanks to you for listening. Check out the show notes at draftingthepast.com to find links to Megan's books and her first appearance in episode one. And like we said earlier, let us know what you'd like to see in the new expanded Drafting the Past website and newsletter coming this fall. We are excited for all that's to come as we work together to make sure that friends don't let friends write boring history.
