Preston Lewis's Blog

Harriet and I are finishing up the final draft of Pintsized Pioneers at Play:  Homemade Frontier Fun and Danger, the sequel to our award-winning Pintsized Pioneers:  Taming the Frontier, One Chore at a Time, which has turned out to be the most honored book in my writing career.

As we move into production on Pintsized Pioneers at Play, I thought I would check with our publishing/distributing firm IngramSpark—which is the primary distributor for independent publishers like our Bariso Press—on the sales of Pintsized Pioneers.  We were delighted to learn the first book in our Pintsized Pioneers series has been the No. 1 paperback best seller since the first of the year in Ingram Spark’s Young Adult/Nonfiction/History/United States/19th Century category.

We’re No. 1!!!  Apparently the reason I never reached that rarefied ranking before was that I didn’t have Harriet as a co-author!  I’ve certainly learned my lesson.  Now being No. 1 in the Young Adult/Nonfiction/History/United States/19th Century category is not like being atop the fantasy, zombie or Harry Potter categories.

Consequently, we won’t be spending our winters on the Riviera, but we can certainly afford a trip to the Monahans Sandhills if we get the whim!  The nice thing about seeing the spike in our sales is I can project when we’ll become million sellers.  Based on our sales rate, it appears we will sell our millionth book in April of 83,358 A.D.  So, we are planning a big shindig for the occasion, and are hereby inviting you to attend the celebration.

We’ve got a little time before you need to RSVP, but if you could let us know by November 4, 2025 when Pintsized Pioneers at Play is scheduled for release, we’ll put down a deposit on the coliseum and the catering.  Just e-mail us at prestonlewisauthor[at]gmail.com with your RSVP, and we’ll add you to the guest list.  We are looking forward to seeing everyone!  If you can’t wait that long to party, ask all your friends to buy the book, and we’ll move the date up a few months.  Until then, keep reading!

Too Much The Lion by Preston Lewis

Today is the release date for Too Much the Lion:  A Novel of the Battle of Franklin.  As of yesterday, IngramSpark, our Bariso Press distributor, ranked the hardcover No. 23 and the trade paperback No. 36 on their bestseller list for Historical Fiction/19th Century/American Civil War.

This book, which may stand as my magnum opus, was more than a quarter of a century in the making, starting with a snooty rejection letter from a major university press on a previous nonfiction manuscript.  The nonfiction manuscript was on a project dear to my heart, the memoirs of Dad and his six surviving siblings of life growing up on a West Texas tenant farm during the Great Depression.

One anonymous academic reviewer for this university press, whose name I shall not speak, commented that this material should be handled by a “real historian,” meaning someone with formal academic training in history.  That hacked me off, so I decided one day to go back and get another master’s degree, this time in history, so no snooty academic could question my credentials ever again.

The opportunity came when I became director of the communications and marketing office at Angelo State University.  In my position I reported to the ASU president, who just happened to be a tenured history professor.  When I told him of my wish, he graciously consented for me to pursue the degree, giving me flex time during the day to take whatever classes were not offered in the evening.

It was a fun experience as ASU had a lot of talented historians in the department.  Dr. John Wheeler was one of them, a fabulous teacher who did things the old-fashioned way.  In fact, when he retired, in 2006, he was the last professor on campus still using a manual typewriter.  Dr. Wheeler taught the course on the Civil War, which I took and thoroughly enjoyed.  As part of that course, each graduate student had to research and prepare an hour-long lecture as if he were teaching a class.

Fortuitously for me, Dr. Wheeler assigned me to teach a class on the Battle of Franklin.  I started researching the confrontation and found so many fascinating human stories, I kept researching it after the class ended.  I read and studied every book, journal article, and original documents I could find online.  On top of that, in 2014 we made a trip to Franklin, Tennessee, and visited the site of the battle and walked the grounds to gather additional information.

After a quarter of a century or research, study and writing, it is nice to see the book in print.  Begrudgingly, I suppose, I should thank that anonymous academic reviewer who questioned my credentials decades ago for starting me down the journey that led to Too Much the Lion.  So, on the release date of Too Much the Lion, thank you for starting me on this incredible learning and writing experience.

Harriet and I are pleased to announce that our Spur Award-winning book Pintsized Pioneers: Taming the Frontier, One Chore at a Time is now available in audiobook format on Amazon, Audible, and Alexa.

Although we had been exploring audiobook possibilities for our Bariso Press books, it was always too complicated or expensive to pursue. Then yesterday at 3:01 p.m. I got an e-mail from Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing:

“Congratulations! You’re invited to participate in KDP’s beta for audiobooks. Starting today, you can now produce audiobook versions of your eligible eBooks using virtual voice narration and reach new customers by making them available on Amazon, Audible, and Alexa. Customers have already enjoyed listening to millions of hours of audiobooks with virtual voice from KDP authors.”

So, we started exploring the possibilities by checking out the KDP link. We looked at the instructions and decided we could do that, then listened to 23 different voice options before deciding on the one we thought best for our YA nonfiction book.


After selecting the voice and making some adjustments to the meta data, we marked it ready to publish. By 6:32 p.m., just three and a half hours after we received the e-mail, Pintsized Pioneers was available in the Amazon Store and on Audible. Artificial Intelligence is just amazing in what it is able to do and this process cost us nothing upfront. Amazing!

It’s available for $9.99 on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Pintsized-Pion...

Audible, another Amazon platform, made it available at https://www.audible.com/search?keywor...

According to Amazon, it’s also available through the company’s Alexa. Since Alexa and I are not on speaking terms, I can’t confirm that.

The audiobook runs 4 hours and 17 minutes should you be interested for an upcoming trip. Enjoy!

A Good Beginning

Over the years, I’ve written close to sixty books, but never have I penned a beginning sentence I am prouder of than the one that opens Too Much the Lion:  A Novel of the Battle of Franklin, which is scheduled for a May 13 release.

“Like the unceasing tears of the dying Confederacy, the November raindrops fell cold and bitter against his cheeks,” begins Too Much the Lion.  The man referred to in the sentence is Major General Patrick Ronayne Cleburne, the nominal hero of the book and an honorable but long forgotten Confederate hero.

To me the sentence captures the weariness and fate of the Confederacy after three and a half years of war.  Too Much the Lion focuses on the five days leading up to the tragic Battle of Franklin on November 30, 1864, and its heartrending aftermath.

The villain is Confederate Lieutenant General John Bell Hood, a pugnacious fighter but a crippled man whose responsibilities far exceeded his talent as commander of the Army of Tennessee.  The strained interplay between Cleburne and Hood, whose hubris is ultimately fatal to thousands of men under his charge, is the thread that runs through the historical novel.

Too Much the Lion is written in the style of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, which focuses on the Battle of Gettysburg and the ill-fated Pickett’s Charge, often called the “high tide of the Confederacy.”

Both books provide vignettes of actual historical figures in the encounters, though The Killer Angels covers the battle from both Union and Confederate military viewpoints.  My novel follows only the Confederate side from the point of view of generals, soldiers, Franklin civilians and slaves affected by the encounter.  Originally, I had envisioned more Union viewpoints, but felt it would make the novel too long, coming in at 108,500 words as it is just focusing on the Southern side.

While Pickett’s Charge is the most famous frontal assault in Civil War history, the attack at Franklin actually covered twice as much ground with twice as many soldiers as did the Gettysburg storming.  And, when the gunfire ended, the Franklin Confederates held their objective, though not without a fearsome cost that eviscerated the Army of Tennessee as an effective fighting force.

Preliminary reviews have been highly laudatory:

Kirkus Reviews wrote, “As a clash becomes inevitable and tensions rise, Lewis examines it from multiple angles, with the important inclusion of two enslaved people, which emphasizes that the Confederacy was “a slave to the idea of slavery as a way of life.”  Most poignant is the story of Henry B. Free, whose surname Lewis invented, as records did not grant the real man a surname.  The book would likely have benefited from presenting Union soldiers’ perspectives on events, as well.  However, Lewis’ intense historical research shines through in his inclusion of military movements, maps, and photographs, which give the work the feel of a history book.  His prose is also often vivid, highlighting war’s futility and bringing to life the sights, sounds, and smells of the battlefield (“The stench of gunpowder mingled with the odor of the viscera the powder had created”).  A fast-paced, well-researched work that will particularly appeal to military history enthusiasts.”

D. Donovan, senior reviewer, Midwest Book Review, commented, “Too Much the Lion: A Novel of the Battle of Franklin is a historical Civil War novel that narrows its focus to the five days leading up to the Battle of Franklin on November 30, 1864. Readers need no prior insights into this particular battle in order to appreciate the vivid “you are here” feel of the times, which gives Too Much the Lion a thoroughly absorbing attraction to Civil War buffs and general-interest history readers alike….The saga opens on a Saturday and concludes six days later on a Thursday.  Readers might initially think this short span of time will translate to a simple read—but they’d be wrong.  Much action, many confrontations, and thought-provoking dilemmas take place within this short period of time, giving Too Much the Lion an extraordinary air of thought-provoking, fast-paced events….Staying true to historical accuracy while building a fictional overlay of drama and everyday events is no light challenge, but Preston Lewis provides engrossing, thought-provoking passages that achieve both objectives…”

Kirkus Reviews further honored Too Much the Lion by selecting the online review to be included in the upcoming May 15 issue of Kirkus Reviews magazine.  Less than 25% of reviews of self- or independently-published books are accorded this recognition.  Too Much the Lion is being published by Bariso Press, Harriet’s and my imprint.

Pintsized Pioneers at Play

At the Tucson Book Festival today, Western Writers of America announced that Harriet and I would share a prestigious Spur Award for our Pintsized Pioneers:  Taming the Frontier, One Chore at a Time. 

Pintsized Pioneers took top honors in WWA’s Juvenile Nonfiction category.  This is my third Spur Award and Harriet’s first.  I am especially proud to share it with her.  Though her name has not been on my previous two Spur Awards, she certainly shared in making them possible for me, so I am delighted that she gets the credit she has long deserved.

Pioneering work on the childhood experience in the American West was done by Elliott West.  Harriet and I were honored to be seated with Dr. West and his wife Suzanne at WWA’s Spur Awards Banquet last June in Tulsa.  They were just delightful.

We shared how his book Growing Up with the Country, originally published in 1989, had inspired us to write Pintsized Pioneers for a young adult audience, and had a delightful evening when he received a Spur Award for Continental Reckoning:  The American West in the Age of Expansion.  By banquet’s end we had promised Dr. West we would send him the first copy of Pintsized Pioneers when it came out in September.  We did and received a gracious note in return.

We are already working on the sequel Pintsized Pioneers at Play:  Homemade Frontier Fun and Danger.  Originally, the subtitle was just going to be just Homemade Frontier Fun, but as we got into the research we learned it wasn’t all fun on the frontier when it came to play, so we added “and Danger.”

The book’s not written, but the cover’s done so we are including it in this posting.  We are aiming for an October or November release.

Thanks to WWA for this great honor and thanks to my co-author Harriet Kocher Lewis for supporting my writing efforts over the years, even if you didn’t always get the credit you deserved.  Now you have!  We will pick up our Spurs at WWA’s annual meeting in Amarillo this June.

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Cute photo of four of our five grandkids
reading Pintsized PioneersCute photo of four of our five grandkids
reading Pintsized Pioneers Harriet and Preston LewisHarriet and Preston Lewis Suzanne and Elliot WestSuzanne and Elliot West

 

[Click on images to enlarge]

Welcome to my new and vastly improved website prestonlewisauthor.com.  This year is shaping up to be the most momentous in my writing career, so it was time for a change.

First, I had planned to release my magnum opus Too Much the Lion:  A Novel of the Battle of Franklin in 2025.  Second, last month the Will Rogers Medallion Awards announced that I would be receiving their Lifetime Achievement Award in November.  Third, there are some exciting announcements on the 2025 horizon so I decided it was time for an upgrade.

When I retired from higher education communications and marketing eleven years ago, I knew I was going to continue writing because I loved telling stories, but I also realized I had to keep learning, not just about the writing craft but also about publishing and promotion in the digital age.

My father, a child of the Great Depression, was frugal and a do-it-yourselfer, so I followed his example and started a website through a packaging firm.  It was functional, though far from stellar, but at least gave me a web presence.  In 2021 Harriet and I also started the award-winning Bariso Press, which now has another functional but packaged website at barisopress.com.

Preston Lewis and Chris Enss, executive director of the Will Rogers Medallion Awards

So, with Too Much the Lion and some other unforeseen possibilities looming on the horizon, I decided in January to seek professional help.  With the release of Too Much the Lion:  A Novel of the Battle of Franklin pending this year, I decided to contact Krista Soukup, who operates Blue Cottage Agency, a Minnesota marketing firm which represents authors and promotes the literary arts.  I first met Krista through Western Writers of America.

Krista and I had a Zoom meeting in January, and I signed on with Blue Cottage.  Since then, I have been excited to work with her on overall marketing.  She linked me with her Minnesota-based associates Janell Madison, who is providing social media graphics for my projects through her Clicks by Madison, and with Corey Kretsinger, who owns and operates MidState Design and has done the bulk of the work on my vastly improved prestonlewisauthor.com website.

Their expertise and support have freed me up to do more writing and will allow me to blog more consistently in the future.  You have already seen Janell’s work in the graphics on my social media platforms.  And, with the debut of my new author website, you will be impressed with Corey’s work as well because of the site’s fresh look and functionality.  Krista has provided wonderful guidance in moving forward with my writing career.  Thank you all.

I started writing 49 years ago and with Krista’s, Janell’s and Corey’s professional assistance, I feel like I am on the verge of becoming an overnight success!

The Kindle edition of Lottie’s Luck, the first fiction project from our Bariso Press, is now available for pre-order for $4.99 on Amazon. Both trade paperback and hardback editions will be available on the July 15th release date.

New Cover for Lottie’s Luck

This is a revised edition of a book published by Eaken Press in 1989 under the title The Lady and Doc Holliday. I never liked the original cover nor the title, so I convinced my favorite editor and publisher to go with the title as I first submitted it. Harriet agreed, so it will now appear as I originally envisioned it.

Val as Doc

The Lady and Doc Holliday was the only book I ever published that resulted in impressing my kids when they were still living at home.  After the movie Tombstone came out in 1993 I, like everyone else, was enamored with Val Kilmer’s portrayal of Doc Holliday.

The Lady and Doc Holliday was the only book I ever published that resulted in impressing my kids when they were still living at home.  After the movie Tombstone came out in 1993 I, like everyone else, was enamored with Val Kilmer’s portrayal of Doc Holliday.So, taking a longshot opportunity at getting my novel made into a movie, I found Val Kilmer’s New Mexico address and sent a copy of The Lady and Doc Holliday to him as a possible prequel should he decide to reprise his role as Holliday.

One evening I brought in the mail and held up a small envelope hand-addressed to me on the front with an embossed address on the back flap.  I recognized the New Mexico address and said, “Kids, guess who this is from?”  They didn’t know, and they didn’t care until I said, “It’s from Val Kilmer.”

“No way, Dad,” was their reply until I opened it, and their jaws dropped.  It was indeed from Val Kilmer, a handwritten thank you note no less.  Finally, Scott and Melissa were impressed with my writing prowess.

Nothing ever came of the prequel, but the thank you from Val Kilmer was a special moment for me, as I had finally impressed Scott and Melissa, not to mention Harriet

This year in rewriting portions of the book and taking off some of the hard edges of the original novel, I included a subtle homage to Mr. Kilmer for his performance in Tombstone and for his courtesy to me.  You’ll have to read the book to figure out the tribute.

Here’s the link to pre-order the Kindle edition of Lottie’s Luck on Amazon.

Thank you note from Val Kilmer

The release date for my next book, Betting on Horses:  Racing as an Economic Development Tool in Frontier West Texas, 1886-1896, has been set for March 21 from Bariso Press.

This book is different from my previous ones, a nonfiction historical account of a little-known aspect of horse racing on the frontier.  As a popular Old West pastime, horse racing could always draw a crowd to admire and bet on horseflesh.  Realizing its appeal, boosters of the nascent West Texas community of San Angelo used horse racing to attract both investors and settlers and to distance themselves from competing communities in the Concho Valley.

Betting on Horses explores a critical decade in San Angelo history when local promoters incorporated racing into their boosterism, sending local horses across the nation and broadening the community’s national exposure and reputation.  Betting on Horses is the story of one frontier town’s efforts to survive and thrive as it vied with competitors for the telegraph, for the railroad, for exposure that would attract investors and for its long-term survival.

Too, it’s the story of Concho Valley racehorses like Belle P, Get There, Hal Fisher and Viola Belle, who raced on tracks from San Francisco to New York and from Chicago to New Orleans.  Most famous of all the San Angelo racers was Charley Wilson, the star-crossed chestnut with the gigantic stride that beat fabled California mare Geraldine in two out of three races but was later tarnished in a cheating scandal after San Angelo owner John R. Nasworthy sold him.

The Nasworthy Cane

Remnants of the Concho Valley Fair Association Racetrack

The citizens of San Angelo were so thrilled by Charley Wilson’s victories over Geraldine that when owner Nasworthy returned from the races they presented him with a cane adorned with silver horseshoes representing the stallion’s victories.  After I confirmed this family account through period newspapers and documents, Nasworthy’s grandson Tom Nasworthy surprised me with the cane as a gift after I had spoken to the Tom Green County Historical Society on his grandfather.  It was a touching moment.

My greatest discovery in the research was a long-lost racetrack.  As San Angelo boosters tried to draw visitors in the late 1880s, they established the Concho Valley Fair Association to host an annual agricultural exposition and horse races.  They built a fairgrounds and racetrack east of town, but it had been lost over time.

A single clue to its location from a 1920s paper gave me the general location of the track and, using Google Maps, I was able to locate it on the grounds of Quicksand Golf Course.  The remains of the racetrack are still visible from the air when you fly into San Angelo.

Betting on Horses offers a fresh perspective on horses in frontier life and boosterism and, I hope, a significant contribution to West Texas history.  It will be available on amazon.com after March 21.

Call of the Wilde, the eighth volume in my comic western series based on the memoirs of H.H. Lomax, is scheduled for release by Wolfpack Publishing on March 21.

In this adventure, the hard-luck Lomax comes face to face with Oscar Wilde, the oddest character he’s ever encountered in his travels out west.  In this tale of crime and fun-ishment, Lomax matches wits and holds his own against one of the wittiest purveyors ever of the English language.

On the trail to becoming Wilde’s personal bodyguard, Lomax is falsely accused of a bank robbery in Texas, escapes the Lone Star State for Utah in search of a wife (or wives) and makes his theatrical debut on a Utah stage before hooking up with the young poet, resulting in frontier hilarity.

Lomax may not have won the west, but he made it fun with his unpredictable adventures and his knack for running into the celebrities of the time, even if they came across the Atlantic to reach the Wild West.

Today marked the release of Rio Hondo, the third book in my Three Rivers Trilogy on the Lincoln County War.  Published by Five Star—Cengage/Gale, Rio Hondo follows the story of Billy the Kid in the aftermath of the feud that turned southeastern New Mexico Territory into a tinderbox between 1878 and 1881.

Billy the Kid is a peripheral character in Rio Hondo, much like he was in the feud itself, but even so he drives the action that motivates my protagonist Wes Bracken, who is only trying to live a decent life and build a future for his family against all the forces that are working against him.

The novel focuses on the Kid’s effort to get a pardon from territorial Governor Lew Wallace, who during this time was working on his novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ.  In one of the oddest encounters in the history of American politics and jurisprudence, the governor and the outlaw actually met in a face-to-face meeting to work out details of a pardon.  Both men left then encounter with different interpretations of their agreement.

Rio Hondo follows Rio Ruidoso, which explored the racial animosities which preceded the Lincoln County War, and Rio Bonito, which thrust Wes Bracken into the intertwined animosities of the classic Old West feud.  All three are available in hardback on and will be published late next year in an e-book edition.

My thanks to senior editor Tiffany Schofield and editor Hazel Rumney for taking on the trilogy and enhancing it with their editorial skills.  A special thanks to Hazel, who I’ve known since the 1990s and who is retiring this summer.  She was always a joy to work with.