Case study · Historical fiction · 2025
ASIN B0DRV21X3P
An emeritus history professor came to us with a 138,000-word manuscript that read like a textbook in places and a novel in others. Two passes of developmental editing got it to 96,000 words and a structure that worked. Self-published in May, picked up by a Macmillan imprint for a three-book deal in October.
Inside the project
Working shots from this engagement — interview sessions, manuscript pages, cover concepts, launch day.
A 138,000-word manuscript and a shoebox of primary-source photocopies. Thirty-one years of teaching had given him the period; nothing in the manuscript was wrong, factually. The novel was buried inside the history.
Maya read the manuscript twice. First read, for story. Second read, for what was load-bearing. The novel had a protagonist. The protagonist had an arc. Six chapters of period detail (a chapter on grain prices in 1947, a chapter on rural electrification, a chapter on the GI Bill applied to farm towns) were beautifully researched and did nothing for the protagonist. They came out.
What replaced them was thirty pages of period-detail interleaved into the existing story chapters. Not summary — scene. The grain-price chapter became one scene of the protagonist standing in the co-op office watching the chalkboard get rewritten. Same fact, different register.
The argument with Marcus over those sixty cut pages took two long phone calls. The phone calls were the work. Marcus rewrote the back half of the manuscript in 14 weeks and the new draft was lean in a way the first was not.
Marcus had no platform. No Twitter, no newsletter, no podcast appearances scheduled. The launch was on his historical-fiction reader network plus organic Amazon Ads. Clara’s team built campaigns targeting category-page placement; the book sustained inside the top 5 of its sub-category for over a month.
In September, an agent at a New York agency emailed Marcus directly. She had read the book on a flight, looked at the Amazon sales rank, and pitched representation. Three months of submission later, Macmillan acquired the trilogy. The hardcover keeps Marcus’s cover; the new typography for the imprint matches our line.
“Maya cut sixty pages from the first edit. I argued for fifty of them. She was right about every one of those fifty.”
Cover rounds
The shortlist we presented to the author before round-one revisions. The selected concept is the second in the strip.
Project facts
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