Self-publishing your book: my own experience
when i decided to publish my poetry in book form last spring, it seemed like a daunting task. i had 10 years of poems to sift through, organize & arrange into a working manuscript. this, notwithstanding the steps of layout & creating cover art, was enough to almost stop me in my tracks. what keep me going was a promise i made to my sister (who passed away in April ’08 & the book is dedicated to) that i’d put the writing out there…no matter what.
luckily my background is in editorial journalism & content management, which lent itself handily to the project. so, armed w/about 30 poems, i went to work. the first step was choosing which pieces to use out of this pool & making sure they were in absolute final form for publication. an editor by nature, i poured over each one, completing an exhaustive editorial selection process. after about 2 weeks, 26 poems remained in relatively random order.
next was organizing them in manuscript form & typesetting the actual document. that took about another 2 weeks, which led me to the book’s first draft form. of course, i could’ve used a professional program like QuarkXPress or InDesign, but instead chose Microsoft Word, a relatively simple but robust text editor w/plenty of advanced layout options. my object was (& remains) to keep things as simple as possible. Word allowed effortless copy/pasting text from other docs into a master manuscript file w/no formatting issues as most of my individual pieces were composed using it.
the challenge came in consistency for line spacing, page breaks & page numbering, which took a while. properly numbering each piece in the formation of a TOC (table of contents) was somewhat annoying as Word is not user-friendly in this dept. eventually, i made it work & everything was copacetic. not surprisingly, the TOC required quite a bit of tweaking after the fact.
finally came the cover art. now, i’m not exactly a graphic artist, but still knew to create this myself – nobody else could capture exactly what i wanted to visually convey through it. after an intensive search for a cover photo (almost 2 weeks!), i found the right image. then the process became surprisingly easy, for some reason. it literally only took an hour for me to create the layout in pocket book format while sitting in a coffee shop.
lulu.com is a POD (print-on-demand) portal which offers free copyright contracts for new authors looking to self-publish their own work. after signing up, they made the process very easy to follow for configuring the finished product. they first give you an option to upload the manuscript as a text document, which is immediately converted into PDF (their default file format). next is choosing your print paper stock, color, size, & ink (color or B/W) options. cover choices follow, & then a request for proof copy to verify your approval of the final printed matter. the only thing you pay for is production & shipping costs.
my book is entitled Emotional Fissures. you can learn more about it here.
the key to lulu’s contract is that you still retain rights to your content, but they are legally the publisher. it eliminates any grey area on who owns the intellectual property in terms of copyright. the best part was when they waived a $100 self-publishing fee (originally the cost, but their contract options changed between when i began/finished my book).
so, to anyone planning to publish their own writings, i highly recommend self-publishing as a low to no-cost option which affords you complete control over the entire process. if you need help, please don’t hesitate to contact me – it’s my profession, after all…
Tagged: Emotional Fissures, layout, lulu.com, poem, poetry, publishing process, self-publishing, writing
“Indigenous was created to address a need for increased awareness of western society’s consummate disconnection from Nature. in the mass corporatization of our culture, any physical connection with the natural environment has been summarily severed through indoor work, exercise & electronic pastimes like the Internet. this prevents us from equalizing on all levels (physical/emotional/spiritual) & communing with Nature.