Looking on to my next nonfiction book

I'm finishing up my book on tales and stories from the Vietnam War, and I'm looking ahead to my next nonfiction book.  One of the reasons why it took me so long to write this latest one is because I had such high expectations of Two Gun Hart and The Great Heist.  I expected at least one of them to become a best seller, and to get made into a movie.

When neither of those things happened, I became very discouraged and sort of wondered why I was bothering to try.  To be perfectly honest, I still feel a lot of that discouragement, but I owe it to the subjects of this Vietnam book to complete it and release it.

And I owe it to myself to keep going.  I love writing and I love telling stories.  I've focused a lot more on my fiction work, particularly Relic Worlds.  But I have several nonfiction stories that I'd like to do.  So I'm going to write up a chapter and summary on each, and send them out to agents and publishers again and see what happens.

I read one writer say that he has his nonfiction published traditionally and his fiction published independently.  I thought that was an odd way to do it and to me it should have been done the opposite way.  But now I see the guy's point.  Publishers bring better promotion opportunities, especially for nonfiction.  Fiction work can be series, and it's easier to promote a series on your own as you can just keep talking about it.  I'm finally learning how to do it with Relic Worlds.  But nonfiction is a one-shot deal, so you need that support.

With that in mind, here are the ideas I'll be developing:

The story of one of the Roman emperors

The making of Lord of the Rings

Tales of people's lives during the Iranian revolution

The Cornhuskers championship season of 1994

We'll see what happens next.