Though I am a fan of spoken word, my first love is words on the page. For as much as I travel, I should probably own a Kindle, but truth be told I prefer having my own copy of a book to dog ear and highlight, to write notes in. Since I can remember it has been my dream to be a published author. I was in high school when I first started publishing articles and poems, not just in the school paper, but in the Madison Times. I even got a piece accepted in the Feminist Quarterly. And it was exciting to see my name in print, but what I really wanted was to go to my favorite bookstore and see my book on the shelf.
So I started writing books. Actually as my parents have pointed out, I have been writing books since I was a kid, but 3 years ago, I actually finished one. This was still not quite the book I dreampt of. I also envisioned myself as a novelist, but when my mom asked me what I was going to do with all the poetry I had written, I printed it all out and realized I had written enough to make a book. Then I went about the process of deciding which pieces made sense and which themes were represented by my work, hence the title God, Hair, Love and America.
Self Publishing was kind of an accident. All I really intended to do was make a Christmas present for my mom, but when my friend showed me how to do it and then suddenly my book was available on amazon, I realized...well that this was something bigger. Here were my two fundamental hang ups: If I self publish it's like admitting it wasn't good enough for a "real" publisher. How am I going to market my book?
I am still wrestling with marketing, but self publishing turned out to be a very empowering experience. I finished a draft of my novel a couple years back and started sending it out to agents, just to get rejected. While everyone had told me not to take this personally, I did, because that is where my head was at. I got several really great letters praising the quality of the writing, but explaining that it wasn't a good fit for that specific agent when I realized that rather than be bummed about the rejection, I should be happy that people who didn't really see the value in my story weren't going to be the ones trying to take it to that next level. I don't want to work with anyone who doesn't believe in me or my work. And I realize that part of self publishing was making a declaration that I believed in my work and was not only willing to put my name on it, but my logo as well. I also liked having complete control over the process from the type and size font to the cover art.
The difference between a chapbook and being self published is reach. The benefits of chapbooks are that they can be short and simple. You can make them by hand and re-produce them yourself usually at low cost. You can also be creative. If your chapbook isn't being mass produced you can play with formats that don't fit into standard size templates. I had one creative artist tell me he wanted to do a pop up book...which sounded both awesome and time consuming. Disadvantages...chapbooks usually don't have ISBN numbers which means you can't put them in the library or sell them online easily. (You could still maybe do ebay or etsy or something, but again your reach is limited).
With self publishing it would be really difficult or expensive to do a pop up book, but if you just want to make a standard book shaped book with a cool cover and whatnot, you could not only do that but them be able to sell them around the world.
With that in mind I designed a four week finishing workshop for poets with chapbooks or stacks of poetry they would like to turn into book. It starts tomorrow and I am getting excited.
