*Drum roll please*
The cover for my upcoming MFA Thesis Novel is finally ready! Many thanks to Vine Leaves publisher Jessica Bell for the awesome design, and for her willingness to go back and forth with me about some key elements. (Behind the Scenes Look at How the Sausage Gets Made: one of them was the meaning of the Korean word on the neck tattoo!) If you want to check out more of Jessica’s awesome cover designs, you can find them all on the press’s book page.
Before last month I had no idea what kind of cover the novel was going to have. I’d wanted something cool, contemporary, and relatively edgy that would highlight the novel’s fun, playful tone, but other than that I wasn’t really sure.
At the beginning of the process Jessica sent me a survey asking for some elements from the novel that I thought would make good cover material. I filled out the survey in far more detail than was likely needed, suggesting characters, themes, motifs, and a few quotes from memorable scenes for her to choose from.
Plus, I suggested that there definitely be orange involved. Orange is the color of the fictitious university football team whose imagery dominates the novel’s midwestern world, so I wanted orange to be featured on the cover as well.
The cover quote “John Irving on steroids” comes from Jonis Agee, my old advisor at the University of Nebraska and one of several mentors I contacted about providing blurb quotes. Here’s the full version of what she sent, which I was super-excited to get back:
MFA Thesis Novel is a delicious romp through the smudged halls of academia where pretenders, druggies, hapless romantics, and the slightly talented do battle in fiction workshops trying to invent a book that will save them from the fate of ordinary life. While suffering bad advice, sabotage, regret, sloth, fear, and longing, their brawling over plot, women, and meaning reminds us of John Irving on steroids. This book will make you laugh out loud as it skewers the sacred cows of the graduate writing workshop and the world they mirror. Ian M. Rogers is a heck of a satirist!
– Jonis Agee, author of The Bones of Paradise
Response to my initial Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram posts last week was overwhelmingly positive, and it was super-exciting to have a cool novel cover to share with people. It makes publication seem that much more real, and makes the novel easier to talk about, since I now have an image I can use instead of just mentioning the name all the time ;-)
Anyway, I’m happy to add the cover to the blog feed for the time being, though I’ll be looking to feature it more prominently on the Day Job Blog in the coming months as part of my bigger website redesign (!!!).
And of course, I’ll be posting a lot more about this before April, when MFA Thesis Novel finally comes out :-) Have a good week, everybody!