How MFA Thesis Novel Went From Word File to Actual Published Book

Most people never consider how books get made.  We have that idealized image of the grizzled writer sitting at a typewriter then delivering a hearty stack of clean pages to the publisher, who waves a magic wand and PRESTO, out pops a cleanly printed book with cover and crisp inside pages.

Nowadays, that fantasy involves a Word file and email instead of a typewriter, but the disconnect between writing and bookmaking still seems to be there for a lot of writers.  Truth be told, I had no idea how much work and how many steps go into publishing a book, which is why it was cool to learn the process when my own novel got made into an actual hard-copy book (Spoiler: I’ll show pics at the end!).

Here’s a rundown of how that process went, how much work it took from me and the others at Vine Leaves Press, and where the novel stands now.

 

The Finishing Touches

Over August and September I worked with my awesome editor Melanie Faith to go through the entire manuscript again for what’s known as the developmental edit.  The developmental edit is where the writer makes bigger structural changes like reordering scenes, cutting extra chapters, changing characters, and fixing other issues big and small.  In my case, Melanie didn’t recommend any bigger changes to chapters or scenes, so we focused on rewording some smaller trouble spots on a line level, which I wrote about in my post about the developmental editing process.

One important thing about the developmental edit: after this stage, I wasn’t supposed to make major changes to the manuscript.  That meant that other than fixing typos or grammatical errors, the novel, as-is, would be in its finished form.

We finally got all the kinks ironed out before our September 21st deadline, and when all was said and done, I felt confident calling the novel finished.  Melanie sent it off to Amie McCracken, the publishing director who handles typesetting and formatting for Vine Leaves Press.  And after that, I waited.

 

Copy Editing and Galleys

A few weeks later, in late October, Amie got the text back from the copy editor and proofreader, and emailed me an uncorrected proof in PDF form.

If the developmental edit covers big things like scene changes and rewrites, the copy editor and proofreader are tasked with fixing typos, catching grammar mistakes, and smoothing out rough-sounding sentences.  In other words, they fix stuff that’s less visible, but still important for making the novel look professional.

The uncorrected proof is also a fancy name for a draft that’s been laid out with the novel’s basic material (title page, Acknowledgements, About the Author, etc.) but doesn’t have any formatting yet.  As you can see in the above pic, it used the same Times New Roman font I used for the the main part of the book.

At this point I could have checked over the manuscript one more time to see what changes the copy editor made (more on this later), but my main focus was to send the novel out for blurb reviews, which I’ll talk about next.

MFA Thesis Novel is a very funny book about books, about creativity, about a writer’s need for isolation vs. the desire for community – these are outsiders among outsiders, and Ian M. Rogers writes with a wit that’s as dry and sharp as the best academic satire.

– Timothy Schaffert, author of The Perfume Thief

What’s a Blurb Review?

A blurb review (also known as a puff review or puff quote) are those quotes from big magazines and famous writers that you see on the front covers and inside pages of books.  Sometimes there are several pages of them, and sometimes there’s just one or two, but for professional books that have been published in the last few decades, they’re nearly always there.

Every so often I read a tweet or blog post about the blurbing process, and whether it’s really necessary.  For big-time writers with publicists and big marketing budgets, publishers have an entire process in place to get the novel into the hands of professional reviewers who’ll write honest (and hopefully good!) things about it.

For small presses and indie writers like me, though: the process is a bit more rudimentary: we basically have to email our more famous writer friends and ask them nicely to read the book and write us a quote.

Fortunately for former creative writing students like me, our professors know how this process works because they probably had to beg their own mentors for quotes back when they were young.  As such, they’re almost always happy to provide a blurb quote, even for writers like me who’ve been out of grad school for a while.  Though it takes time to read an entire novel, it seems like a good way of passing on a favor, as well as for the blurb-writer to get their name out there in a very small way.

The first people I contacted after getting the uncorrected proof were Jonis Agee, Timothy Schaffert, and Sean Doolittle, my writing workshop teachers from the University of Nebraska who’d looked at my first novel back in 2013-2015.  I’d already asked Sean about this when we did our blog interview last year, but Jonis and Timothy were hearing about the novel for the first time and were all too happy to help.

I also emailed Annabel Davis-Goff, one of my undergraduate professors from Bennington College who helped me with my senior thesis on Joseph Heller, and whom I’d sporadically kept in touch with. Annabel Davis-Goff has had a long career that’s spanned several decades and different avenues, and sending her my manuscript meant a lot to me—partly because she was a great teacher who helped me with my writing once upon a time, but also because she’d actually met Joseph Heller and several of the other writers I mention in the novel.

The final blurb-writer was actually the first person I’d asked: S.R. Stewart, the managing editor of Unsolicited Press who offered me a publishing contract for MFA Thesis Novel back in 2020 that they unfortunately had to rescind because of COVID-related economic concerns.  Though the cancelled contract was a shock at first, I sent her a very understanding email that she seemed to appreciate, and we’d kept in touch in the months afterward.  She was also very supportive when I told her that the novel had been picked up by another publisher, and heartily agreed to support a novel she believed in by writing a blurb review.

Finally, here’s a Writer Pro Tip: Always send your blurb writers a hard copy of the book when it comes out as a thank-you.  Don’t forget this crucial step!

 

The Cover

Around the same time I was sending out the proof for blurb quotes, publisher and cover designer Jessica Bell emailed me asking for input on the cover.

Apparently, cover design is something that trips up a lot of writers, who think they’ll have control over the cover design the same way they had control over the novel’s text.  In the end, cover design is actually a marketing decision, and the publisher knows more about what sells and how the cover can be used to attract readers.  A writer might have some input on the cover, but the publisher always has the final say.

In the case of Vine Leaves, Jessica designs all of the covers herself (and they look really cool!), but she wanted to get some ideas from me before starting the design. She sent me a short survey that offered plenty of room to share ideas:

1. Please describe to the best of your ability what you envision your cover to look like. We can’t promise that your ideas will work, but if they do, Jessica will do her best to incorporate them.

2. Please list at least five visual items that are mentioned in your book that you believe represent your subjects and themes.

3. Find 3 comparable titles. Tell us the first books that come to mind that are similar to yours, but we want them to be recognizable and hopefully on best-seller lists. We are going for books that the public will recognize and then realize they need to read your book too!

My answers are too long to share here, but I suggested something contemporary, featuring younger people, something to do with writing, and possibly some metafictional elements, since the novel has a lot of those.  Because orange is also the color of the fictitious university football team that everyone except the protagonist is obsessed with, I also suggested integrating orange in some way.

When Jessica sent me the finished cover a few weeks later, I was drawn to it but also not sure about some of the elements, at least one of which I was afraid would be confusing for readers.  I shared my concern with Jessica and she was happy to change it. As such, the rear character’s t-shirt now features the opening lines of Flip’s novel-within-the-novel, which is a cool detail I liked a lot.

From a fact-checking perspective, I also wanted to know about the Korean word on the rear character’s neck tattoo, which I couldn’t quite figure out using the handwriting feature on my phone’s Google Translate app.  Instead, I asked some coworkers for help (thanks Kirsten and Donal!) and they were able to track down the answer: the word in the tattoo is 사랑과, which means “love” or “romance” in Korean, in keeping with another of the novel’s themes ;-)

 

Handwriting and Images

MFA Thesis Novel is a pretty complex book: in addition to the regular narrative, there are also snippets of the novels that the main characters are writing, along with handwritten sections and a conversation over text message that I wanted to look like an actual smart phone screen.

For the handwritten portions, I wrote one of them myself, and I asked some friends (thanks to Mike Rushia and Stu Keenan!) to write and scan the others so the handwriting would be different for the different characters.  This was back in 2018 when I was still revising the novel, and the files had been sitting on my hard drive since then.

Unfortunately, though, when we originally scanned them we only used a scanner with 200 dpi (dots per inch), which wasn’t good enough to print in an actual book.  Amie emailed me saying the images needed to be at least 300 dpi, which meant that I had to email Mike and Stu asking them nicely to rewrite and rescan their sections from three years ago (thanks again, guys!).

I also had to rewrite and rescan my entire section, a two-page rant where the caffeine-addled Craig shares his doodle-filled outline for a novel with too much action in it.  Here’s my first low-res attempt from 2018:

Fortunately my scanner in Japan could go up to 400 dpi, but the real problem was finding a pen that would make the writing look decent on the page.   Here’s what I hastily rewrote in October 2021 with a pen I had in my drawer:

This second version looked good as a scan, but when Amie shrunk it down for the actual novel it was far too thin and light.  I felt silly rushing the job, so I asked Amie nicely if I could do it over one more time (d’oh!).

This time I went to an actual stationary store, checked out a bunch of different pens (in Japan you can test pens right in the store!), then bought five of them to do a final handwriting test.  This time I was really pleased with how it came out:

The cell phone images were more complicated.  I’d originally made them using a free online converter called Fake Text Message for Android (now offline) that let you customize a text, along with screen elements like the date and WiFi strength.  Unfortunately, these images were also too low-res to use in the actual book, and this time Amie suggested asking Jessica for design help, which she was happy to do (many thanks Jessica!!).

I really like Jessica’s final design, which incorporates all the elements of the original, plus adds in the text typing box and the heart-eyed emoji for a zany touch.  Because we spend so much time texting on our phones (especially for dating!), I really wanted this section of the book to look and feel like an actual phone as a way of replicating that experience.

 

The Final Check

As you can imagine, because I was busy emailing writers about blurb quotes, asking old friends for new handwriting scans, checking Korean words, buying different sizes of felt-tip pen, retouching handwriting, and worrying about the cell phone design all while working my pretty busy university job, I felt pretty overwhelmed, which is why I left the final check to the last minute.

I deeply regret not taking more time to check over the formatted PDF proof version of the manuscript after Amie sent it to me in November.  This version had a lot of issues: when it was converted to a single-spaced document (see above), a LOT of my special formatting was lost, especially when it came to spacing, so the lines in most of the special sections ended up mashed together.  In my corrections (which I made using the sticky-note and highlighter tools in Adobe), I had to check and mark each of these areas to make sure the novel had the look and feel that I wanted.

The formatted proof had also been sent to the copy editor and proofreader in succession, as I mentioned earlier.  While they caught a lot of comma issues and skillfully split some of my more unwieldy sentences into shorter ones (thanks!), they also inadvertently changed some things I didn’t mean to change, or that affected the feel of certain sections.

Some of these mistaken changes were for consistency: for example, in the novel, Flip works for a literary journal called Long Grass, but because I erroneously referred to it several times as the Long Grass Review, they standardized all of them to Long Grass Review.  Because the word Review was actually the mistake, when I caught this I had to go in and mark all of these instances to be changed back.  A few other changes also inadvertently altered factual elements of the novel, eliminated a joke, and in one instance, modified some phrasing that I’d specifically written to reference the ending of James Joyce’s short story “The Dead.”

As I went through and found more of these issues I realized I had to go through the entire novel closely one more time line-by-line before I sent my changes back to Amie.  Unfortunately, I only fully realized this the night before my deadline, which meant that I stayed up until 3am checking to make sure nothing else had slipped through.  Again, the vast majority of the changes were smart and useful, but it was only those more substantial ones that needed catching.

If could do it over, I definitely would have left more time for this final check, and in the future I’d even consider asking to see the revisions in MS Word with Track Changes so I could see them more easily, rather than having to hunt them down in the PDF. (I’ve heard this practice isn’t common, but could be worth considering for the future.)

 

The Finished Product

Ta-da! Last week I received my first copies of the novel to check over, and they look great!  It was incredible to see the actual novel in hard copy form after going through this entire process, and I felt an even bigger sense of accomplishment knowing how much work it had taken and how many people came together to make this all happen.

The actual release date is April 19th, and as of now, MFA Thesis Novel has a listing on the Vine Leaves Press website and its own Goodreads page (special thanks to those readers who’ve already left reviews!), and pre-order links to several online retailers, which is also really exciting and makes the process feel much more real.

Finally, a LOT of you have been asking me how they can get signed copies, along with the best way to buy the novel and support me as the author.  With this in mind, I’m going to be offering a Special Awesome Limited Pre-Order (!!!!!!!) where you can order signed copies with a personalized message with guaranteed delivery by the April 19th release, along with some custom-made cool TBA swag (oh yeah!).

The Special Awesome Limited Pre-Order is set to start next Monday, February 28th, so watch the blog and my social media pages for more info ;-)

And as always, thanks for reading, thanks for supporting me, and thanks for showing an interest in this ridiculous work I do—it means a lot!