The Road to Print

Over the next several months, I’ll periodically share my experience of moving Kid America, my first young adult novel, from publisher acceptance to book release. Along the way, I’ll provide links to elements of the process that supported me.
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Head Rushes and Headshots (Posted May 15, 2026)

The best Kid America news so far in May is the permission to use Allison Russell lyrics in the epigraph. I floated on that news for a couple of days. A great head rush, of the secondary meaning type. And I can thank AI for an assist in making this happen. 

After googling how to request permission to use copyrighted materials, I crafted an email with all the pertinent information. I then googled who to contact to ask for permission to reprint “Requiem” lyrics. AI came back with a few people, each with their own expertise in the Russell world, such as who to contact if you want to schedule a Russell performance (maybe one day), who to contact for permissions, and so on. 

I googled the permission person to make sure AI wasn’t spazzing me, but yes, the person represented Russell on copyright issues. What would I have done without the internet, Google, and AI? Am that dependent on technology? 

Well sort of. I managed well before it existed and manage well without it in all major functions of life. But it sure makes things a lot easier, especially on search and seizure tasks—you know, when you need to find information quickly and grab it for larger purposes.

AI has been a major topic of discussion in my English methods course. To a person, the students have a great disdain for AI. These are twenty-year-olds, too, but they’re becoming English teachers so that serves to counter Gen Z traits. For them, it’s not the cheating, environmental desecration, or bias issues that piss them off, although they recognize those issues as real. It’s the idea that people are cheating themselves of important skill-development opportunities. Put it into the context of teaching, these students are adamant that any use of AI is going to deny their students opportunities to develop critical thinking and writing skills. I agree, but it's nice to be able to ask a question like, “Who’s Allison Russell’s copyright person?” and get an instant response.

Once I got a name and email, I did the rest—I wrote the email, followed up, answered their questions, and so on because I have the skills needed. But my students are right about the cheating-ourselves-with-AI concern (The world would be a much better place if English teachers were in charge.). Now they’re trying to figure out how to be the teacher who can make content relevant and meaningful, so their students won’t want to cheat themselves. 

Anyway, I emailed the permission person. Six weeks passed. She finally responded saying she was sending my request to another person. That person, in turn, responded within a few days, with a few questions. I answered them and within two days I had permission to use the lyrics gratis as long as the novel is in print. Easy peasy. 

Getting permission to use Russell’s lyrics was easier than getting a decent headshot for the novel jacket. I have only a few photos of me by myself—maybe five or six from the past thirteen years, which is how far back the photos on my phone go. Of course, any photo older than eight years is a deception. I’ve aged, considerable, since my daughter was born. Go figure. I needed a recent photo of only me that was worthy of Kid America.

I went to work. First, I cropped others out of recent photos. That diminished the quality of the photos although it usually made me look better. I’m much more attractive blurred. These photos were “unusable,” so said the publisher.  

I took a few selfies, and like all my selfies, they looked like perp shots. I looked like any communities worst nightmare.

I asked John, my neighbor, an avid bird watcher, to take one with his birding camera. He had sold the camera when he stopped birding but offered to take one with his phone, a much better one than I had. The photo looked great. I looked horrible. 

That’s when I asked, Bernd and Anke, friends with whom we go camping. We were meeting up at a state park for the weekend. I figured headshots with trees and water in the background might divert people’s attention from me. Anke took about thirty photos, and I sent the two best ones off to the publisher on Monday. Here they are:

                 

Hopefully, one or both these will work.  Of course, Beth, the layout designer, will crop and clean them up to make me look pretty (I hope). Thanks, Bernd Ruschmeyer and Anke Drexler. If it’s a go, Anke has a photo credit coming to her.

We are six weeks away from KA’s lockdown date. Everything must be done and no additional changes can be made after that date if we are to meet the July 30 presale date and November 3 release date.

I wrote the acknowledgements. It’s nice to be able to thank those who have played a part in this. Of course, there will be names missing. I set up Ingramspark and KDP accounts. I also created an Instagram account and have begun to post a few things about KA and some links to my website. More on these later.

I’m looking forward to reading copy-edits soon. It will be my first look at the entire layout, book-like. Exciting stuff. 

With this post, it’s safe to say all revisions have been made to Kid America, including identifying a subtitle. Or at least all major revisions have been made, including a slight but significant one to the title. It is now Kid America: A Novel of Inheritance and Survival. The MPP production team had been pushing for a subtitle from the beginning. The worry was Kid America suggests something fantastical or of the superhero genre. Far from it. The novel is about inheritance and survival. 

I started playing with a few subtitles a couple of weeks ago and shared them with friends. The MPP production team gave me about fifteen other possibilities. Aimé, KA’s production director, and I went back and forth on a few of them before I picked A Novel of Inheritance and Survival, based on her strong recommendation and feedback from others.  

We’re in the design phase now, working on all the book stuff that goes around the story, like the cover,  inside layout, front and back matter. The next time I see the full manuscript will be in layout form and ready for proofing. 

Aimé, Nicky—KA’s graphic designer—and I have been working on the cover for a few weeks, with Nicky doing most of the work, of course. We whittled it down from a half dozen possibilities to one. Nicky is tweaking the color scheme, but it’s all but done and at the top of this page.

I like the contrast of rural-scape and urban-scape and the distinctive appearance of both. The yellow title stands out. My hope is that the cover and title will be hard to miss on a bookstore shelf. 

Testimonials are starting to come in. I had written in an earlier update that I would share them, so here are the first two. This one’s from Sarah Donovan:

Sarah’s a literacy scholar and author of Writer to Writer! She sent two lovely extended testimonials, one of which can be read as a book review. I think, like with everything Sarah does, she went above and beyond. She’s a teacher educator at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, doing great work with in-service and pre-service teachers. Take a look at her Ethical ELA website. 

I love Sarah’s line about the landscape being a force itself. A writer will create an image, a setting, an interaction, or whatever and its meaning will rooted in the writer’s subconscious, not fully articulated or developed. For the writer, it just feels right. It often takes someone else to identify more fully what is conveyed emotionally or psychologically. Sarah did that with the line about the landscape.

Here’s another testimonial, this one from author Douglas Rappaport:

Douglas’s most recent book is Dead People. However, it is his Reckonerthat is akin to Kid America in its take on too many adolescents’ lives. More on Reckoner later, as I’m working on a review.

I hope to have more testimonials to share next time. I know at least a couple of other people who have said one is coming.

I’ll be meeting with Aimé next Thursday to review progress and what’s ahead. I need to make some marketing decisions. 

On another front, Deborah Halverson sent me feedback and revision recommendations for a middle grade manuscript I’ve been working on for four years. I mentioned Deborah in my first “Road to Print” post. She my editor extraordinaire. There’s lots of work to do on the middle grade novel. It’s my summer project and the follow-up, although not sequel to Kid America, with a goal of publishing sometime in 2027. Meanwhile, Kid America: A Novel of Inheritance and Survival is front and center in my mind.

It’s been a few weeks since I provided an update on Kid America’s road to print. I expected March to be quiet. Kid America was with Beth, the novel’s copy editor. Nicky, the graphic designer was doing mock-ups of cover art and inside layout. My task was to identify and contact influencers. Decisions and edits would happen in April. That’s what I thought.  

It turns out things got busier sooner than expected. 

In my last “Road to Print” post, I wrote about needing to identify influencers. I had no idea how to contact them and why anyone would agree to say anything about KA without having read it. Aimé, my Production Director, set me straight. Send them the latest draft of the book, she said. 

Yep, I was overthinking that one, although nothing I read online said I could send the entire manuscript to someone. It seems intuitive now. Give them the manuscript, of course. Intuition, though, is the ability to use prior experience to make sense of new experience without having consciously to reason about what needs to be done. Sometimes a little direct instruction helps, a little push in the right direction.

I sent KA to people I respect in the young adult literature world, beginning with those who advocate for literature about rural lives and culture. I also sent it to a few authors who have written about rural youth. Over the next few weeks, I’ll let you know where I stand on testimonials, including who has responded. I’ll share the work of the people who are supporting my work. Just know I’m ecstatic with the responses I’ve gotten so far.

To those influencers who don’t respond or who say no, I get it. They shall remain anonymous, and I’ll keep following them and reading their work. 

Last week, I got copy edits back from Beth. It came a week or so ahead of schedule. This was KA’s second professional copy edit, the first coming from Deborah Halverson. Before sending the manuscript to Mission Point, I had Deborah do a substantive edit and a copy edit. 

Along with her edits and proof marks, Beth identified a couple of other issues she thought needed to be addressed. Like with most feedback, my gut reaction was first to ignore (for a couple of hours), then reject (for about fifteen minutes and as surly as I could get), and then to squirm (for a day or two), because what if they’re on to something and it’s an irreparable flaw of the narrative that can’t be fixed? Usually, they are on to something, and I can fix it. 

First, Beth raised a question about the appropriateness of scenes with Lenny, the protagonist, cleaning his grandparents’ nude bodies. Without giving away too much here, I understood Beth’s concern but felt strongly about the importance of the scenes for what they convey about Lenny and his predicament. I realized she had hit on something no one else had noticed, and I needed to address her concern. I revised to show more explicitly how Lenny feels and what he is trying to do and why. 

Similarly, the second issue had to do with a scene near the end and the lack of Lenny’s emotional response. The recommendation here was to show Lenny’s emotions (of course), and I revised to do that. 

So while I disagreed with Beth’s recommendation to delete the scenes with nudity, I understood she saw something other readers might see and perceive negatively. I think my revisions strengthened the novel by revealing Lenny’s evolution in the face of the conflicts he is facing. 

Kid America has gone through so many revisions based on others’ feedback over the last two years or so that it has reached a point where, although every word in the novel was put there by me, the current novel wouldn’t exists without the feedback I’ve gotten. Not everything readers have offered up has been incorporated, but everything has informed my creative process and how the novel comes across to others. Writing is very much a social process or should be to work well.

Ironically, an adolescent, or the audience to whom the novel is aimed, has yet to read KA. I’d like to change that over the next few weeks. I need to find some adolescent readers. Some adolescent influencers.

A final note, with more to come in later weeks: Book cover mock-ups came a couple of days ago. I’m reviewing six mix-and-match cover options and three interior designs, including chapter head art and fonts. Nicky created some beautiful cover designs, giving me options while responding to my preferences to a T.  I met yesterday with Terese, a marketing and publicity person, to talk about how to get the book out to the world. Here, too, I have a lot of options I need to wade through over the next couple of weeks. 

Whereas all aspects of the publishing process are familiar to me, marketing (including gathering testimonials) is new and something I probably would have refused to do ten years ago. I’ve always believed—and have reminded myself constantly—that I’m the type of person who couldn’t sell lemonade on the sun. I want to do it now,… not sell lemonade but push in any way I can Kid America to the larger world, especially adolescents. How to do that is still to come.

One last thing: Pre-sales begin July 30. Kid America’s release date is November 3.

Soon after I posted last week’s “Road to Print” post (see below), Kid America’s publication process kicked in. The work began. I got a Project Manager and a list of things to do. I knew this was coming. I know, though, once the initial tasks are completed, the work will slow, as the novel will be moving through Mission Point Press's queue along with several other books on similar deadlines. My work will come in spurts. 

Aimé, my Project Director, sent a questionnaire requesting some of the more difficult texts a writer must create, or at least they are for this writer: a short book description, a long book description, and an author bio. A book description of any length is hard to conceptualize after living through the drafting of the actual book for a couple of years. Of course, I know what Kid America is about, but whittling it down to between twenty-five (short bio) and two-hundred fifty (long bio) words is not easy. It’s akin to describing the child you love in a sentence or two. Sure you can do, but seriously do you want to have to do it?

I also had to identify seven keywords and as many influencers as possible. The keywords part is familiar to me, the influencer part not so much. Of course, I know what an influencer is in the digital media sense, but in book publishing I wasn’t so sure. 

IngramSpark describes influencers as people with a following, or people who can reach many other people, preferably readers. Yep, same, same: they're people with social media reach. So I went to the one place where followers are counted and reported—the Internet. Here’s where the keywords came in handy. I used them to search for people who have used similar keywords or who have an interest in the keyword topics my novel addresses. I did a few Google searches and came up with a quick list of bloggers and authors with websites who might be interested in a novel like Kid America. I’m now crafting emails to send to the influencers, fully prepared for rejection. 

The whole process seems ass backwards. I’m asking influencers to say something nice about the novel before they can read it. I can send them a synopsis and maybe even a chapter or two, but that’s about it. I’m not sure how they can say anything honest about the novel other than it’s coming out and might be good…or might not. For me, that’s a tough sell not because I can’t convey what my novel is about but because the influencers would be going out on a limb to say something, good or bad, about a novel they haven’t read. Or at least it appears that way to me. It's not something I would do, but I’m not an influencer. But maybe taking that risk is what makes an influencer an influencer?

Or maybe I’m just misunderstanding how this process works? It reminds me, however, of querying agents. That process, too, seemed asinine to me when I was doing it. I had no success at it, and I wouldn’t be surprised if contacting influencers has the same results. But I’ll do it.

I also need to provide Aimé a quality headshot. I found two, quality of both debatable. I’m waiting to hear back from her on whether they suffice. 

On Monday, Aimé and I will meet for the first time, virtually. We’ll create a timeline, talk production, and share ideas for the work ahead. Mainly, I'll listen. After that, within the next few weeks, I’ll talk with marketing people. It’s marketing I’m anxious about…but excited to do. I’ll have to put myself out there in ways I have never done before.

I’ve learned a couple of things the past two weeks. One, my life has gotten busier fast, but in a good way. I realize if this is what I want to do everything else I do professionally will need to take a backseat to writing and publishing. Before this, writing co-existed with my other professional responsibilities. I had time for both. That is ending.  

Second, I realize that with some initial, albeit small, success I am even more desirous of success. It is not unlike what I felt when I began doing scholarly research thirty years ago. When people noticed, I took heed and tried even harder. For me, success, no matter how small, begets the desire to work harder if only to legitimize the success.

I have another novel working its way through a professional edit. I want the second one ready for publication before Kid America is released. The second would come out in early 2028. After that, there is a third and a fourth novel in my queue, fully drafted. Looking way ahead, I plan to publish them all, each about a year apart. Knowing the publishing process and the need to market what I put out there, I hope in a year or two I can fully transition to being a writer and not a writer and professor. I’ve said this before, but this time it’s not so much an aspiration. It will be a necessity.

I started writing Kid America on November 1, 2021. I signed up for NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month challenge, with the goal of writing fifty thousand words for the month. The challenge was an annual thing. It was the first and only time I did it. The sponsoring organization went under a couple of years later, its demise shrouded in scandal. No, it had nothing to do with me. And fear not, there are alternatives for those looking for a writing kick-start.

When I started Kid America, I already had solid drafts of two middle grade novels that weren’t going anywhere. I hadn’t given up on the MGs, but I was ready to tackle something aimed at older readers and  timelier. Covid was on its last leg, and I was anticipating an onslaught of pandemic novels. Why not, I thought. 

I wrote over fifty thousand words that November, a good chunk of it in California during Thanksgiving week. Then I let the novel sit…for a couple years. I started and nearly finished a third middle grades novel and revised the first two. I didn’t open the Kid America file during the time. 

When I did open it, Covid had passed, but the narrative still resonated with me. It read, however, like a hodge-podge of memories and incidents that, while connected by time, place, characters, and conflict, didn’t hold together as a novel. Which made sense in retrospect. As I wrote each day in November 2021, I never went back to reread what I had written the day before. Each day, I picked up where I thought I had left off the day before. Also, I didn’t have an ending. Or maybe on November 30, 2021, getting to 50,000 words was my ending? In reality, though, I had 53,437 words. 

I began reworking, starting on page one, and revising, rewriting, and in several places creating anew. As I rewrote, I was more conscious about the whole and what each beat was contributing to it. I tracked character development and narrative ark. I fleshed out backstories and settings. In some places, I was not so much drawing on childhood experiences as I was drawing on my impressions of those experiences. I wasn’t drawing on memories but on the meaning of those memories. I gave them to Lenny, the main character. 

I also drew on what I knew about rural life and the quiet stoicism of farmers and blue collar workers. I could not have named all this as a child, but as a writer, the lives of farmers and factory workers were intuitive to me. I had lived it, not directly but as a child observer of adults. I felt I knew who my characters were in real life, whether it was Mom, Paps, Grams, Yellow-Hair, Misty, and all the rest.

I used my memories of schooling to create Lenny’s school experience. That I had lived. I imbued in the kids and teachers some of what I remembered about my education. I also drew on students I had taught in Chicago schools and community sites. I was writing about two very different contexts—urban and rural—but I had lived a long time in both and knew both from a working class perspective.

By Fall 2025, I had the novel I wanted, clocking in at just over 43,000 words. I did some research and found a couple of editors. Having emailed with both, I picked one: Deborah Halverson. She first did a substantive edit, identifying strengths and shortcoming and offering recommendations (most of which I took). I spent a couple months revising. Then Deborah did a line edit to make it look pretty. I edited accordingly and did a bit more revising, again taking what Deborah offered to heart. 

I had never enlisted a professional editor before. Friends and family have read my stuff. I’ve participated in writing groups. All offered good feedback, but none the depth of review Deborah offered. I had what I saw as a submittable draft by the end of January 2026. 

So I submitted to two hybrid publishers. With a history of rejection after rejection on my first two middle grades novel, I wasn’t interested in going through the slow slog of querying agents or contacting publishers and hearing back from less than five percent of them. “Nice, but no thanks,” had become grating.

With the hybrids, I heard back within a couple of weeks. We talked, they sent proposals, and I decided Mission Point Press was the one for me. It had good reviews. An internet search found nothing suspect about them. They ticked all the boxes people in the know about hybrid publishers said they needed to tick. And Jen Wahi, the President and CEO, was direct, informative, and easy to talk to. No sales pitch, just a detailed description of what they do and what will happen if I go with them.

I signed the proposal and am on my way. I’m awaiting a timeline but have a tentative pre-release date in September, and a release date in late November 2026, or early January 2027. I’m putting together an author bio, trying to find a pretty photo of me (good luck, right!), and thinking about cover design. Ahead of me is reading copy-edits and proofs, reviewing designs, and doing something I’ve never done before, marketing my book, or marketing anything for that matter.

With my first book, an educational ethnography, I made no effort to sell it. Although I wanted people to read it, I had no inkling or desire to market it. It’s now out of print. This time around, I’m ready to do what I need to do to get it out there and in people’s hands or on their devices. So here goes.

Over the next several months, I will provide updates from time to time on what is happening. It’s a new journey for me, one I’m happy to share.