Angie Klink writes compelling stories of Americana and the hero’s journey. An author of twelve creative nonfiction books set in the heartland, Klink is a historian, biographer, essayist, scriptwriter, and copywriter with sixty-one American Advertising Federation ADDY Awards. She has written for Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History magazine, MS. Magazine, and the American Writers Museum. She was the scriptwriter for two documentaries narrated by actor Peter Coyote: the public education film Rise Above the Mark and Eternal Flame about Tom Kelly, a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2024, the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution honored Klink for her distinguished contribution to historic preservation, particularly the publishing of books. A six-time attendee of the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop at the University of Dayton, Klink received an Honorable Mention in the Bombeck Writing Competition. She holds a BA in communication from Purdue University.

1. Your book, Forging Ahead: How Five Generations of Small-Town Values Collided with Big Ambitions to Spark One of America’s Fastest-Growing Companies, came out this month. What inspired you to share this story? Why were you the one to tell it?

I received a call from Amy Abbott, a writer I know through my attendance at the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop at the University of Dayton. She had been contacted by a friend who told her he was helping the CEO of a Southern Indiana, fifth-generation, family-owned company to look for a writer to author a book about the legacy and growth of his business. Would Amy be interested?

That sort of book was not in Amy’s writing wheelhouse. So, she kindly thought to recommend me because of my book Kirby’s Way: How Kirby and Caroline Risk Built Their Company on Kitchen-Table Values about the founding and evolution of Kirby Risk Corporation that began as a tiny mom-and-pop shop and grew to a multimillion-dollar Midwestern electrical supply company. Kirby Risk led his business and life true to the adage found in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol: “Mankind was my business.” This same forthright undercurrent of putting people first is also evident at Nix Industrial.

So, without knowing what company wanted a book, I told Amy to have her friend contact me. At first I was tentative because people often approach me with book ideas, but they do not come to fruition because of the financial and/or time commitment, or the idea isn’t viable.

Of course, now I’m very happy that I responded to the email about the “mystery company” that connected me to Matthew Nix, his family, the administrative team, and their inspiring story of Nix Industrial. Founded by Matthew’s great-great-grandfather in 1902, in tiny Poseyville, Indiana, Nix Industrial started as a blacksmith shop. It was a welding shop for decades before Matthew began working there in 2004 at age twenty with his grandfather, father, and aunt, the only employees.

Amid family pushback, Matthew had an insatiable itch to grow the business. After several years of trial-by-error growth, stumbling and falling as he learned to manage people and a business, Nix Industrial became the burgeoning, revered custom metal fabrication manufacturer and industrial repair powerhouse it is today.

Besides having the experience of authoring a previous family-owned business saga, I was also the one to tell the story of Forging Ahead because my husband Steve and I owned a family business—Indiana’s oldest drugstore, Wells Yeager Best Pharmacy, founded in 1829 in Lafayette, Indiana. It had been owned by Steve’s father, who was a pharmacist, and Steve expanded it into a successful, small chain. We sold the business in 2007, but its lasting legacy to our family and our community remains. A heritage akin to that of Nix Industrial.

2. What does your writing process entail? Do you storyboard or outline before you start? Do you carve out time each day or week to get it done?

I write every day. Besides writing books, I write advertising and marketing for clients, scripts for short documentaries, essays, profiles, and promotions for my books on social media and more.

I rarely make an outline or a storyboard for a book. I have done it when a publisher asked me to, but I dislike it. Feels like busy work. I like to jump right in. Since I write creative nonfiction—biographies and histories (most of my books intertwine biography and history because to know a person, one needs to know the context of the wider world)—I start by thinking chronologically as I interview people and conduct research through archival papers, letters, diaries, newspapers, and more.

I create folders, either real paper folders or folders on my computer, identified by decade, and insert the research materials I unearth from the various time periods in the corresponding folders. As I write, I mingle the facts with many quotes from my interviews to give the history a voice and the book its character and aliveness. No boring, historical droning with a bunch of dates and years allowed! Lots of “showing” and not telling. If the person I’m writing about is deceased, I lift quotes from letters, diaries, newspapers, etc., to bring that person to life. Or I quote someone else describing that person. I adore diaries, journals, and letters!

I may begin writing chronologically but then discover a pivotal moment that could become the first chapter to hook the reader. In the chapter that follows, I go back in time to explain how that pivotal moment came to be.

In Forging Ahead, the lead chapter tells the story of the summer day when Matthew, age eight, was called into the welding shop by his father who needed a pair of small hands to fit into a tight space to make a repair. It was Matthew’s first taste of working at the shop, and he loved it, despite the grime and Indiana humidity. His father needed him, and he was bursting with pride. The juxtaposition of that chapter with the knowledge that today Matthew is CEO of Nix Industrial, employing nearly 200 people, is telling and inspiring. How did he expand the business, particularly in the face of the disinterest of his grandfather, father, and aunt in doing so? That is the “rest of the story” told in the subsequent chapters.

3. What is one aspect of publishing—from editing and design to marketing and beyond—that shocked you? What’s been challenging? What’s been easy or comes naturally to you?

Forging Ahead is my twelfth book, so I have seen a lot. I self-published my two successful children’s books, which have university niches: Purdue Pete Finds His Hammer about Purdue University and I Found U about Indiana University. I handled the whole ball of wax on those, from writing the rhyming verses, hiring illustrators, procuring a printer, and marketing. The Purdue book came out in 2004 and is now going into a third printing.

Several of my other books are published by Purdue University Press, so my experience there is with a university press, which tends to be a bit slow in its publishing process and offers minimal marketing because of its different focus on academic publishing. I write about the people and history of the university for the Purdue Press “Founders Series.” I am an anomaly among most of their other authors, professors seeking publication of their research to help them with receiving tenure rather than writing books as a profession and earning their living by writing like I do.

Koehler Books is wonderfully organized and streamlined with the publication process. Koehler moved Forging Ahead through the channels very quickly. I like how Koehler is on top of the marketing and offers authors ways to promote, such as tips on garnering reviews and applying for book awards. Marketing comes naturally to me because the other hat I wear is “advertising copywriter.”

4. Marketing can be all over the place. How have you attacked marketing? What are some tips or tricks you can offer readers?

As I said, I’m also a freelance advertising copywriter, so I enjoy the challenge of marketing my books on social media, my website, through book talks and signings, and my connections to Purdue University and the Erma Bombeck Writers Workshop.

I make good use of postcards for each of my books. One side of the card is the full book cover, and the other is the book description, cost, ISBN, and QR code to more info about the book and where to buy. Since people know I am an author, when I’m out and about, I’m often asked about my latest writing project. I whip out a postcard that they can tuck in a pocket or purse. I always carry the postcards with me because I never know when a marketing opportunity will present itself.

Also, each time I sell any of my books, I include the postcards from my other books tucked inside as cross-merchandising. My children’s books have coloring pages that I include to help market. The coloring pages are also on my website, and anyone can download and print them. I have seen coloring pages on tables at football tailgate parties for kids to color while their parents imbibe.

5. What is your favorite part of the work, process, or aftermath of publishing your book?

My favorite part of the process is telling a compelling, true story, writing in such a way that a topic that may sound mundane on the surface instead reads with heart and intrigue. I enjoy creative nonfiction because it is using the literary tools of fiction to write a true story.

Each one of us has an interesting life narrative that can help another person to understand the human condition. Real stories are universal and help us to connect and understand one another.

I love it when I can bring a genuine tale to life that sounds unbelievable or magical—such as when Kirby and Caroline Risk married as part of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair in my book Kirby’s Way. Or in Forging Ahead, when Matthew meets his adoptive mother for the first time on her death bed. These kinds of stories often feel like they are made up, part of a movie, or fictional tome, but they are very real and resonate more than fictional snippets found in a novel. When my words and storytelling make a reader cry, out of happiness, commiseration, or sadness, then I know I have touched a nerve. I have done my job well. I have made connections over time and space. Readers see themselves in the people I write about, and that makes the trials and constant deadlines of writing all worthwhile.

6. Borrowing from Work In Progress, Sophia Bush’s podcast, what can you describe as a work in progress in your life?

Well, I have written a dual memoir about how my mother’s life affected my life, and I’m seeking a publisher, so that is a work in progress. But beyond that, I would have to say that walking the tightrope of the empty nest is a work in progress for me. I have two wonderful sons, born in 1991 and 1998. While I live in Indiana, where my sons grew up in the same house their entire lives, now one is a filmmaker in Los Angeles, and the other is a strategist for a website marketing firm in New York. When I tell people this, they look at me with puppy dog eyes and say, “One on each coast!” My heart sinks, and my feet wobble on the tightrope.

My sons are doing well, and that is what we want as parents. They are good to me and visit often, considering how far away they live. But with miles between us, it is still hard to live each day in a quiet house, brimming with memories of their happy growing years in every nook and cranny.

So, I walk the work-in-progress empty-nest tightrope. When I lean to one side, I am the encouraging mother, the wind that buoys my sons’ dreams, but when I tilt to the other, I am the longing mother, tempering my want to reach out and pull them onto the rope with me, where we walk, balancing the future together.