We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Don Noble. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Don below.

Alright, Don thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Going back to the beginning – how did you come up with the idea in the first place?

As far as I can remember, I’ve always been creative, and I’ve always loved horror.

I design horror book covers now, and have been for the last decade or so, but I grew up making my own comics, writing short stories and poetry. Eventually poetry turned to music, music became my life for a long while working construction to pay the bills.

Then, as I was leaving construction to become a hospice caregiver, a best friend died. I stopped making music for a long time after that. I went back to art and writing. Somewhere in that haze of events I wrote my first short story collection and my first novel. Started an indie publishing house, and toured all over the states to book shows and horror conventions.

It was in these early stages of the press that I learned photoshop so I could eventually take my art skills and apply them to books and physical media. It took a bit before another artist convinced me to make my designs public.

In one day, one leap of faith, my life changed.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Rooster Republic Press and its imprint Strangehouse Books is an indie book publisher that specializes in horror and weird fiction. We do handcrafted book sleeves for our special releases in wood to resin, but we typically only do one book a year.

Some of our published books included the Stoker award winning The Devil’s Dreamland by Sara Tantlinger and the Stoker Award winning Queen of Teeth by Hailey Piper.

We have over a decade of experience in indie publishing, but both owners of the small company (Nicholas Day, and myself, Don Noble) are lifelong artists and writers. We do almost everything in-house, all the art, production work, editing, accounting – all of it is mostly just two folks.

Nicholas Day is much more focused on the interior side of the business, especially in regards to acquisitions, and editing. He’s an amazing writer and has a critical eye for talent.

I focus more on the art production side of things where I offer cover design work. Most of the time, I’m working on cover art for other horror writers and other presses. When things get slow, I make pre-made covers for fun and sell them for criminally low prices to make sure that any writer, no matter what level of entry in the business they find themselves, has an affordable and quality option that isn’t some AI garbage.

I’ve been able to work with some of the biggest names in horror and it’s great, but really, it’s a rare treat. I’m typically in the trenches with other freelance indie writers. I make horror art, I package it into the physical form you’d find on a shelf, and I kinda exist as a handyman for any graphical needs a client might need.

Been doing it professionally for about a decade now. I’m incredibly grateful and lucky to be doing something I love for a living.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

I was working as a hospice caregiver, and we had the publishing house in the background, but it was still getting on its feet. There was no way I could make a living from just book sales at the point.

I’d been doing cover work for our books, along with learning how to do pixel art and animation for a small game company we launched, and everything was just… crazy. Deadlines, endless 16 hour work days, no real personal life. It was just work. I was driven but there was no real guarantee what endeavor was going to be the key to me stepping away from hospice work and living solely as a freelance artist.

One of my artist friends was looking for a place to crash for awhile until she could get on her feet and she saw me doing some free book covers for some friends. She basically said, “You’re good enough. You should be charging for this.”

I thought that was nice, but I didn’t really have faith it would work out.

Then my last hospice client died. Someone I spent years with. They were family.

I had 600 dollars to my name and I knew I could go back to hospice but I was done. I’d had enough. 10 years of it, wears you out.

So a week after my client died, I took a leap of faith. I made a ton of pre-made covers, shared them on my regular old Facebook account and that was it. I was available for hire.

I have been working from home since. It’s been a trip.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice

NFTs felt like a joke and a money laundering scheme and as soon as that bubble burst, artists got slapped with all of this AI imagery.

There was (and currently is) a whole lot of pop-up “artists” this last couple years willing to sell hardworking writers an AI generated image that cannot be copyrighted without writers knowing that. There have been people just lying to consumers, pretending to be artists, and just flat out scamming people.

Fiver is filled with them. The internet is poisoned with it.

There are others who at least admit they use AI before selling to a writer, and some of them are pretty volatile about their demands to be recognized as artists and designers but a simple question really flattens out that argument –

“The man who commissioned da Vinci, is he an artist or just the prompter?”

It’s clear to anyone in the visual arts that a prompt is not the real work. The machine is doing that for folks, and it’s not just being inspired like a human is inspired, it is scraping data from protected works and living artists.

It’s tech companies stealing from working people.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://roosterrepublicpress.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/franknobleart
• Twitter: @PressRooster

Image Credits

Cover art done by Don Noble of Rooster Republic Press