Trending:
Natalie Keller Reinert knows what it means to stay in the race, no matter the odds.
Although the author, 44, who is well-known for her romance novels centered in the equestrian world, has now found success — and TV deals! — in series such as Eventing and Briar Hill Farms, her path did not follow a straight line.
Reinert, daughter of an aerospace engineer and a project manager, grew up in central Florida. She always loved horses, sacrificing afternoons and weekends mucking in the stables for a glimpse at the world of horse racing. “It was always the thing that was my identity,” she tells PEOPLE.
But she never dreamed she’d be able to turn that love into a line of successful books that will soon be the basis for a television series on Amazon Prime. Especially after she lost everything in the 2008 financial crisis — but she credits her love of horses with turning her life around.
Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
Reinert grew up around horses, starting in her younger years in the sport of eventing. The three-day event usually involves a single horse and a rider that compete across three different disciplines — dressage, which sees the horse and rider performing a series of controlled movements and patterns; cross-country, where riders and their horses navigate a series of solid obstacles; and show jumping, where pairs prove their precision by jumping over a course of fences.
She later moved into racing at about 19, working odd jobs to support herself in the often-pricey sport.
“You have to really work and apprentice yourself and put in the seven day work weeks to get that opportunity to ride,” Reinert explains. “That’s how I did it.”
Alongside her love of horses, Reinert also fostered a passion for literature. She met her husband Cory Reinert working at Barnes & Noble in 1998, where the two self-described “book people” fell in love amongst the stacks of books. Reinert later got her husband involved in the world of horses, and the two started a small Thoroughbred farm together in Florida.
Reinert left the Barnes & Noble she met Cory at in 1999, and later started working at the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida. However, she was part of a temporary lay-off in 2008. Although she was ultimately brought back on part-time, it wasn’t enough to keep her family’s Thoroughbred horse farm afloat.
“And then in the financial collapse, in 2008, was when we had a horse business that was going under, I got off from my job,” she says of her time at Walt Disney World. “We weren’t able to support our business with our income, and the Thoroughbred market suffered serious declines during the financial crisis, so there was no market for our horses.”
“Everything really fell apart all at once for a lot of people in the country, but for us as well. And I got an opportunity for both of us in New York at the racetrack and it was like, should we do this?” she recalls. Once her farm was foreclosed, she decided to take the leap of faith and move to New York.
In 2011, at 30, Reinert moved to Brooklyn, New York with her husband and their 5-year-old son in tow to begin working as an exercise rider at Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens. “We packed our things into our horse trailer, and we just went to New York just to start over again,” Reinert says.
“We didn’t have any furniture. We would find change in our coat pockets to buy a little dessert treat. And that was when I finished that first novel The Head and Not the Heart,” she says. “I decided to self-publish it to see if they could make us some money because we needed some money.”
The first manuscript “changed my life,” she says. “We bought some furniture, we didn’t have to sit on the floor to watch TV anymore.”
“It really made me brave enough to start reaching out for freelance magazine gigs and start earning money from a computer instead of riding extremely dangerous young horses,” she adds. (Younger horses can be dangerous for riders due to their immaturity, lack of experience and potential for aggressive behavior that might form in their adult years, especially if they’re not trained.)
As writing became more profitable, she was able to pay more bills. But even after self-publishing her first novel in 2011, it would take over a decade until Reinert got signed to a literary agency in 2023.
“It was a crazy point in my life because I had taken us through so many ups and downs,” she admits. “I could barely keep up with the sort of treadmill of self-publishing, of staying visible, of staying on category bestsellers lists, just paying the bills.”
Reinert was putting out four books a year and attending book events to sell each novel.
That’s when she decided to pivot and start writing a screenplay. And the very next week, she got a message from an agent, who wanted to turn her books into a TV series and helped her secure a book deal with Flatiron Books.
“That’s how I found out this wonderful person at Amazon Studios wants to make a show and these publishers want to publish,” she says. “I kind of look at it side-eyed a little bit, like, ‘Okay. What’s happening? Sure,’ ” Reinert admits. “I’ve got all these people excited. And I’m like, ‘Okay, if you say so.’ I live on a little farm in the woods in North Florida.”
The author is stepping on to serve as an executive producer of the two Amazon Studios series. Although they have yet to officially cast the show, Reinert has one person in mind.
“Somebody sent me a picture of somebody called Eddie Redmayne, who was a pretty dead casting for Pete in looks,” she says of the male lead in her Eventing series, before admitting, “I don’t actually know who he is.”
As the series starts getting closer to production and she begins to republish a few books of her series with Flatiron, Reinert is grateful for the twists and turns that brought her to this moment.
“I’m very, very proud of everything that I’ve done on my own,” she shares. “There’s a lot I want to do that’s going to take a lot more digging and a lot more experimentation and even research. and I’m really grateful that I think I’m going to get the chance to do that now.”
Read the full article here
