The Origin Story of Simply Murder: The Battle of Fredericksburg

“Simply Murder is the first one, isn’t it?” Darren asked me. You have to imagine the question in Darren’s English accent, though, where “isn’t it” sounds like “innit.”

Darren Rawlings is ECW’s social media manager par excellence. (Not sure how he, as a Brit, would feel about me describing him with a French term.) He wanted to post something about Simply Murder: The Battle of Fredericksburg to coincide with the 163rd anniversary of the battle December 11–13, 1862. Darren loves a good story, and he wondered if there was a story about the origins of Simply Murder—and the entire Emerging Civil War Series that sprang from it.

As it happens, there is a story behind the book. In 2023, when the ECW Series released its fiftieth book, we also produced a commemorative book titled A Series of Civil War Scribblings: Celebrating the First 50 Books in the Savas Beatie Emerging Civil War Series. “Scribblings,” as I call it, is filled with stories and behind-the-scenes tales and trivia about each of our first fifty books. Among those stories is the origin story of Simply Murder, which I’m pleased to share with you here.

(Copies of A Series of Civil War Scribblings are available for sale, by the way. You can pick up a copy for only $10 exclusively through the Emerging Civil War website.)

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The origin of Simply Murder: The Battle of Fredericksburg:

[Kris White and I] had been writing short books for Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park and had a manuscript ready to go on the battle of Fredericksburg. We had aimed to have the book out in time for the Sesquicentennial anniversary of the battle, where thousands of extra visitors would be going through the park and its bookstore, creating the potential opportunity for a splashy release and robust kick-off sales. However, the publisher we’d been working with started pulling some hinky stuff. Again and again. Suddenly the whole deal was going south, despite the best intentions of everyone else involved: us, the park, the Friends of Fredericksburg Area Battlefields (which provided the initial funding)—everyone but the publisher himself.

Let’s take our manuscript to someone else, Kris suggested. The book was done—not just written but laid out. It was ready to go. The Sesquicentennial of the battle of Fredericksburg was two months away. An opportunity still awaited. If we could find a publisher willing and able to pull it off, Kris and I were willing to works our butts off to pull it off, too.

Looking back on all of this in hindsight eleven years later, I can say that one of the things I’ve come to love most about working with Ted Savas is that I can call him with an idea, and we can bat it around a bit, and he’ll provide a yes or no pretty much on the spot. Part of that is because, over more than a decade of working closely together, we’re pretty much on the same page about stuff. We know what audiences want, what will sell, what will add to the scholarship in a publicly accessible way. We know the marketing considerations.

Most publishers, though, require an in-depth proposal, some market analysis, and other documents. In most cases, Ted does, too (his submission guidelines are online). But Ted also has good instincts. There’s still a part of him that reacts on a gut-level because he is, aside from a shrewd businessperson, a Civil War fan and a reader. He knows what HE likes.

When Kris called him, he pitched the Fredericksburg book but also the other books we owned the copyrights to. We could do a series pretty easily, and that would let the books support each other. The idea behind a series was very much in line of the overall ECW philosophy that the rising tide lifts all boats. The success of one helps everyone else.

Ted already knew our work from Chancellorsville’s Forgotten Front: The Battles of Second Fredericksburg and Salem Church [a hardcover battle study we already had in the works with him]—but, importantly, he also knew us from the blog, which was a little over a year old by that point. We’d produced a lot of quality content and—this turned out to be key—we’d paid a lot of attention to our branding. He thought we’d already created a strong-enough brand by that point that it would support a book series of its own.

I was surprised when Kris called me about a half an hour after he’d first talked to me. Ted would take the book, he told me. I couldn’t believe we’d gotten an answer so soon, let alone a positive answer so soon!

We worked closely with Ted’s right-hand at Savas Beatie, the incredible Sarah Keeney, to get the book together. In the years since, there have been weeks where we’re getting some books to press and I’ve spoken more to Sarah than my own wife (true story!). Sarah has been indispensable to the Emerging Civil War Series’s success. . . .

The result of all that wrangling was Simply Murder: The Battle of Fredericksburg, December 13, 1862. Savas Beatie delivered the book just in time for the Sesquicentennial and the Park Service’s commemoration activities. To get all the books where they needed to be on time, Kris and I spent the better part of a day driving around so we could meet up to exchange boxes of books. It was a little harried for a hot second, but as we’d said, if we could find a publisher willing and able to pull it off, Kris and I were willing to work our butts off to pull it off, too. (To this day, there’s still a lot of butt-busting going on to make the book series happen.)

The downside to the whole process was that we didn’t get to proofread Simply Murder as closely as we’d have liked—something that would be an ongoing bugaboo for the series for a while. When we did a second printing, which happened a lot sooner than I expected, we had the chance to make corrections and updates, which relieved me tremendously.

Long-time fans of the series will note some changes to the books since that first printing of that first edition. We tried doing full-page bleeds for the photos at the beginnings of each chapter—photos that went all the way to the edges of the page—but we had to soon drop that because of the printing challenges involves. We had a section called “What Ever Happened To…?” that told readers how the stories played out for each of the book’s main characters. We’ve since dropped that feature because, we realized, future books would essentially answer that question for readers.

In the book, we tried to make sure we covered the civilian story of Fredericksburg, for free and enslaved people. We’ve tried to make sure we cover that side of the story in each subsequent book. We also tried to cover preservation as a topic, something particularly important to the Fredericksburg battlefield because of the Slaughter Pen Farm on the south end of the battlefield. In the years since Simply Murder came out, Kris and I and several of our ECW colleagues have become even more deeply rooted in the preservation community, so the message of battlefield preservation has become an ever-more ingrained component to our books because it’s so personally important to us.

Slaughter Pen Farm also served as a tangible reminder that our books needed to be updated over time to keep them fresh and relevant. The American Battlefield Trust has made changes to its property at Slaughter Pen, and so the books needed to reflect that or else they’d become outdated. That’s a challenge that has held true for the tour components on all the battlefields we’ve written about. Tours need to stay up to date with changes or the tours quickly become obsolete—and so do the books themselves.

Although we’ve tweaked some things over time, Simply Murder gave us a good first shot out of the gate. To this day, the book store at the Fredericksburg battlefield has a tough time keeping the book on the shelves. People visit the battlefield and look for something they can read to tell them a bit more about what they’ve seen, and Simply Murder is just the right length and just the right price to hit the spot—just as Kris and I had hoped.