Note from Janna:
I’m excited to share my conversation with Nadine Takvorian, a first-generation Armenian-American author and illustrator of children’s books and graphic novels based in the Bay Area. Her debut YA graphic novel, Armaveni, came out this year and has already earned four starred reviews — from Kirkus, School Library Journal, Foreword, and Booklist — and it’s a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard selection.
Nadine explains that the road to getting this book published was long and circuitous. She comes from an illustration background and worked for many years in the educational market. In order to create Armaveni, she had to teach herself an entirely separate craft: how to actually build a story in comics format.
Click below to view our full conversation on YouTube, or read the (edited) transcript below.
First — please introduce yourself!
I’m Nadine Takvorian, and my book is Armaveni.
Could you quickly summarize what the book is about?
It’s about a teenage daughter of Armenian immigrants from Istanbul, Turkey. She struggles with her identity and is on a mission to learn more about her family’s history — to uncover some of the secrets her parents don’t want to talk about. She needs to learn more about what happened to them during the Armenian genocide.
Let’s go way back. How long have you been working as an author-illustrator, and what were the origins of your career?
I’ve been doing this a while, but my background is illustration — comics is a little newer to me, though I’ve loved it for a very long time. I’ve done illustration for kids, mostly for the educational market: books you wouldn’t see in a bookstore, that went straight to schools. For example, I did a comic version of a really shortened Beowulf — that was a very fun project. But I always loved stories, and I wanted to tell my own.
An art director once asked me, I think after Beowulf, “Do you have any of your own stories?”
And I said, “I will soon, I guess — I’d better get started.”
That kind of started me in that direction.
How long did it take from that moment — an art director asking if you had your own stories — to actually having a book deal?
That was still a while. I’d known I wanted to make a story about this since I was in college, which was a long time ago. I actually wrote an article in 1999, the year I graduated from art school, where I said that one day I’d like to make a graphic novel about my family’s history, about the genocide. It was just a dream back then.
The art director probably asked me about my own stories maybe 15 years ago. After that, I didn’t know how to make a story — I knew how to make narrative illustrations, but not my own story. So I joined SCBWI and tried to learn everything I could about how to craft a story. It’s so mysterious.
And I think after I became a mom was when the fire really lit. The clock was ticking. I didn’t want this to just be a dream I never went after and then regretted. At least I wanted to try. So I really went for it after that.
What was most helpful for you in learning to become a better storyteller? I always think putting illustration and story together is like learning two incredibly difficult, lifelong crafts at the same time.
I’ll go ahead and name-drop somebody, if that’s okay. I consider him a mentor — I’ve met him and he’s amazing. His name is Brian McDonald, and he wrote a book called Invisible Ink. He’s a story guru.
When I came across his work, it really clicked for me, because the way he talks about crafting a story made sense and broke it down so I understood how to do it. It still doesn’t make it any easier, but it gave me a blueprint.
The most important thing I learned from him is that every story needs an armature — basically, what’s the point of your story? And it’s bigger than a theme. A theme is a one-word thing, but your story can’t be about just one word. If you say “my story’s about love,” well, what are you trying to say about that?
So the armature is actually a sentence. Within your story you have to prove that armature, and everything revolves around it. It’s like sculpting: the armature is the wire you build first, and then you put the clay on top. The armature holds everything up — you can’t start without it.
I really believe that’s true, and I thought about it constantly while working on this book.
I love that you name-dropped Brian McDonald and Invisible Ink. I did a YouTube video last week where I mentioned Your First 1000 Copies, a fantastic book about book marketing. I just love nonfiction books that are truly helpful — and I agree, Invisible Ink is fantastic on story structure.
I highly recommend it. It really helped me so much.
So you started putting the pieces of storytelling together. What was the process of getting from there to a book deal?
This went in a weird, roundabout way. Like everybody, I thought, “I just need to start — write this and send something in.”
I was so new to making a graphic novel that I didn’t understand you first need to make a pitch. So I wrote a whole draft, and it was awful — but I thought, “I did it!”
I sent that awful draft to an agent. They were very kind and gave me a champagne rejection: “This is really nice, but no.”
I was still a newbie and was really devastated. I thought, “Well, I guess this isn’t for me,” not realizing you just have to keep working at it. So I set it aside.
But in the meantime I’d finished the entire manuscript, plus 10 pages of final art for the opening, and I put those up on my website. Then I kind of forgot about it and went back to my other illustration work.
I was still marketing myself as a children’s book illustrator, and I’d sent some work to Levine Querido just as an illustrator — they were open for submissions. Several months later I got an email: “Thank you for sending your work. I was poking around on your website and saw a few pages of this art you had up. We’re really interested in seeing more of that.”
The funny thing is that happened at the very beginning of the COVID lockdown. So it was like — what’s happening? My whole family’s home, everything’s going crazy, and I get this email. I said, “Let me get back to you,” and then I went on a hunt for an agent, because somebody had real interest and I wanted help.
That’s how I found the agent I’m with now. It also took some time, again because COVID was happening and everything was bananas. After I signed with my agent, that’s when I really went to work crafting a good pitch we could submit to Levine Querido and others.
Ultimately I went with Levine Querido — I felt like they got it, they were the first to reach out and connect, and I still felt that with them. I’m so happy. It’s been a great place to be for this book.
What did you do with the pitch? You already had the full dummy finished — did you rework the outline?
I reworked a lot. Anything I’d written that took place in the past, in historical times, I kept.
But the contemporary scenes I completely reworked, because they just weren’t working.
Again, this was my debut, so I still consider myself a newbie — I’m still learning how to craft a story. But I had time.
I also got connected with a critique group, and I worked with them extensively, showing them everything and getting feedback. I totally reworked the outline, made a completely new synopsis, really fleshed out the characters, did all my character designs and some environment designs, and showed them a set of thumbnails — not for the entire thing, but the main things you have to show in a pitch. That’s what I went to work on, because I hadn’t done any of it the first time around.
Now I know: for everybody who wants to make a graphic novel, you need to make a pitch. You don’t have to write the whole thing, but you do need to plan.
One thing I found interesting about the book is that although it’s based on your life, you changed a lot of details. The events actually happened when you were in your twenties, but you made the character a teenager. Is that right?
Yes. That was strategic, because I knew I wanted this to be a young adult book — I wanted to reach teens, and adults too. I wanted to use myself because I wanted to connect what happened in the past to how it affects me, and us, today — these aren’t things that just stay in the past. That’s how I wanted to structure the story.
So I thought, well, I need to make myself a teenage character. But these things didn’t happen when I was a teen, so I had to shift things around. Some characters are composites based on other people, and some experiences I really did have, but I had to adjust them a little so they worked for this story.
I think that’s very common with this type of story. There are so many beautiful graphic memoirs for middle grade and YA readers, and in almost all cases, elements get moved around like puzzle pieces from the author’s actual life. It’s normal.
Yes.
What was the editorial process like working with Levine Querido? Were there significant changes, or was the story fairly solid once you had the pitch?
It was more solid, but the pitch was basically “okay, we’re moving forward — now actually write your draft.” So for them it was the first draft, but for me it was a second draft — a heavily redone one. I did it, and I thumbnail at the same time; that’s just how I work. I sent it in, and I still wasn’t there. There were things working — I really loved working with my editor, he was incredible — and they’re so good about telling you what’s working and what’s definitely not working yet, and that we needed to figure it out.
That first draft took maybe six months, if I remember right. I got my notes, cried a little, then went back and revised some more. When I turned the next one in a few months later, it was like — this is so much better. By my third draft, their second, it was very close.
There were still lots of tweaks, but the structure worked much, much better. And that’s because of the feedback on the editorial side. He’s just so good at what he does. They don’t tell you what to change or how — they guide you and ask questions, and then you go back, think about it, and make the decisions yourself. That comes from them being such good editors.
I feel very lucky for the experience I had there.
It’s a one-color book, right? Was that a decision you made at the very beginning, or a discussion with the publisher?
For me, I knew from the very beginning — even when I made my awful first draft, I always knew it would at least be black and white. I did not want to add any color.
Part of that was the subject matter: it’s intense and heavy, and it just didn’t lend itself to full color. Practically, it would also have taken me forever to color, so it was partly “this is just going to be faster as one color.” But the main decision point was that the subject matter and the story needed to be one color.
It’s actually printed in a sort of teal color?
It’s more of a lavender — kind of purple. We tried a few variations, something more blue and something on the redder side, and it just wanted to be purple. That’s what the story wanted to be.
I think it turned out really well. Even though it’s one color, the fact that it’s not black and white — that it’s this purple — makes it special.
It’s one of those weird, amorphous things — like, where do your ideas come from? I really believe you have to do what the story wants to be, and you have to figure that out.
It’s not obvious, but as you work on it, the story tells you what it needs to be, and you follow that path.
You mentioned right before we started recording that you have a favorite spread. Do you want to show it?
Yeah, let me find it. This is one of my favorite spreads.
It takes place in Istanbul, inside the covered bazaar. It’s a montage of all the cool things you’d see in there, with the characters walking around. This was really, really fun to do.
The artwork is amazing. How long did it take you?
Oh gosh. Just the art — going from completed thumbnails to final — took a year and a half. It took a long time, because this turned into 330 pages of art, I think — 331.
I knew it was going to be nuts. You’re mentally prepared for it, and then it’s a whole other thing when you’re in it. For a year and a half you’re like, “What am I doing? Why did I want to do this?”
But it’s so rewarding when it’s done. This was a passion project, and for any graphic novel you have to love the medium and love the story you’re telling, because you’re going to be in this marathon for a while to create something you feel that deeply about.
Did you have a routine to get all those pages done?
I used a sheet that broke it down — how to schedule out your graphic novel. That was really helpful.
Carey Pietsch’s, is that the one?
Yes, I think so. She made a whole spreadsheet on Google Sheets and shared it, and that was really helpful for figuring it out. Then I made my own chart so I could fill in squares as I completed each stage of a page. That helped me visualize where I was — seeing the light at the end of the tunnel as more squares got filled in.
Once I was in the final stages, I was working six days a week. I gave myself one day off. You do need to pace yourself and give yourself breaks — that’s really important. It’s easy to think “I’ll just crank through it,” but you can’t.
You’ll injure yourself.
Physically and mentally, you will injure yourself. You have to take breaks. But yeah, I was going six days a week, all day — well, if I condense it all together, because I have kids and they’d come home.
And how many hours a day for those six days?
Maybe six hours a day of really drawing, if I condense it all — and then there’s emailing and all that other stuff too. There were nights, and it comes in chunks: my kids would come home, I’d try to spend time with them, and then I’d see if I could do one more page after dinner once they were in bed.
You took my “How to Launch Your Graphic Novel course” last fall. How long after you’d turned in the final art was that?
I finished final art over the summer, and your course started in October, I think. I was so interested because my launch was coming up and I felt like I needed a little more help.
It was so helpful. Some of the tools really helped me — for example, with my newsletter. I had one but wasn’t doing much with it; it was just, like, five people. It’s still not a lot — I need to keep working on it — but it really helped me get to a place where I have enough subscribers that I feel good.
It’s an ongoing thing where you have to keep telling people, “Hey, I have a newsletter if you want to sign up.”
Another thing: leading up to launch it gets crazy — interviews, people asking for school visits, podcasts. You’d made a spreadsheet for organizing and tracking all of that.
I went back and made something like it for myself, and oh my gosh, it was a lifesaver. I was afraid so many emails were coming in that I’d forget to respond to somebody and something would fall through the cracks. I wanted to stay on top of it, so that spreadsheet was really helpful.
And just being connected with other artists going through the same thing was one of the most important parts — having a community of peers, knowing we’re all on the same page, that this is hard but we’re rooting for each other.
What’s been your favorite or most memorable experience since the book came out?
One of the most memorable things is the responses I get from readers. This is a book about an Armenian experience, and for the Armenian community it’s representation — we know our story — which was really important to me to create. But it was also important for people outside the Armenian community, because it’s a history people don’t know about.
I got a note through my contact form from a total stranger in Indiana who said, “I loved your book. I didn’t know anything about this history. Thank you so much for writing this.”
That was the whole point — it touched me so deeply. The fact that it’s reaching people, that they’re learning the history and connecting to it even though it’s outside their experience — that’s amazing. And doing school visits, connecting with kids, has been awesome too.
When you do school visits, are you visiting all different age levels?
Mostly middle grade and up. I’ve done one high school — high school’s hard, they’re too cool for school. Most have been sixth through eighth grade. I wouldn’t really go below that; I’ve seen some fifth graders, but that’s getting kind of young for this story. They’ve been great, though — it’s awesome to connect with the kids.
What’s the framework of your presentation? Do you focus on the creative process or on the story itself?
Not so much the story itself. I split it two ways, because I’ve visited some Armenian schools — they know our story — and some non-Armenian public schools, so I think about how I’ll talk about it differently.
But mostly it’s a little of my journey: how I started getting into art, where I was when I was thirteen, drawing and making stories as a kid, what my influences were, and then the process of making the graphic novel.
Because for me it was so mysterious — how do you do this? I wanted to show kids, “This is how I did it. It’s not the only way, but it’s the way I did it.” And I might do a little drawing demo at the end.
They always love the drawing demos. Have they asked you any surprising questions?
Not yet. I’ve done maybe six or seven presentations, so nothing too crazy yet. Maybe somebody will ask me something wild in the future, but it hasn’t happened so far.
What are you working on now?
That’s a great question. After this, I knew I did not want my next project to be a graphic novel, because it was so hard and intense. I love it and I’m sure I’ll do it again, but my next project may actually be a picture book — again, my background is illustration and I think very visually. I have one in the works that I’m making a dummy for, so that’s probably next.
After that, I have other ideas — it could be another YA graphic novel, or maybe a hybrid illustrated novel.
Maybe just take a little breather, and then —
Well, again, it’s about what the story wants to be. Sometimes you have to work on it, and if it really wants to be a graphic novel, I will absolutely do it. But if it can be an illustrated novel, maybe I’ll steer that direction.
How can people connect with you?
They can find me on my website — there’s a lot there. I have a newsletter, so if anybody wants to connect with me there, please do; I love connecting with people through it. If you search my name, you can also find me on Instagram and TikTok, and I’m on Bluesky and Threads — I’m not posting much there, but I’m there. Those are the main places, and I really love interacting with people and being part of the community.
I hope everybody goes and subscribes to your newsletter and connects with you. That would be amazing. Thank you so much, Nadine — this was great.
Thank you for inviting me. This has been such a pleasure. I had such an amazing time in your course, so I encourage people to sign up for your course too. Thank you.
Connect with Nadine
Follow Nadine’s work: nadinetakvorian.com
Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, and Threads: @NadineTakvorian
Buy Nadine’s book: Armaveni
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Interested in learning more about the marketing principles I taught in the course that Nadine took? I’m teaching a free masterclass on how to build an audience for your work on June 20th.
Click here to RSVP for the masterclass.
