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As teased in my previous piece, I have been working on a new book, this time a small chapbook of poems, inspired by the nature and landscape around Stirling where we live. I can now let you know that this book is nearly ready to go - I received the printed copies this week, and they are lush, though I say so myself. The book is called “The Wizard of Flanders Moss” (named after one of the poems), and once again the marvellous designers at GetCovers have done a gorgeous job with the cover. Isn’t it beautiful?
I will be selling the printed copies directly, either face to face or via my Etsy store, but I will also put up an ebook version on the online stores. I very much don’t see myself as a poet, but I am really proud of these poems!
A friend (hello Tracey!) asked about the process of producing a chapbook, so most of the rest of this post is about the technicalities of self-publishing this particular book - feel free to skip to the bottom if this doesn’t interest you! This is just how I did it, I’m sure if you want to go via an established publisher then it would be different, but publishing it myself has been a great learning experience, so here is what I did and what I’ve learnt.
Firstly (well secondly - the first bit was writing the poems!), I asked in online writing groups I’m part of for recommendations for printers, as I always intended this to be something that I sold directly (normally self-published books on the online stores are printed whenever they’re ordered by a customer via Print On Demand (POD) services, but as this book is only 16 pages total, including the cover, that option would have been prohibitively expensive). I settled on online service InstantPrint, and chose their stapled booklets. The site allows you to choose paper type and thickness, number of pages, and number of copies, and so I was able to work out how much each individual booklet would cost to produce (and thus how many I would have to sell to break even). I also googled ‘instantprint discount code’ and happily found a code for 10% off a first order, and so made the decision to order a larger number of copies to maximise that discount. The spec I ended up with was: silk paper cover, 350gsm, matt laminate; silk paper 150gsm, 16 pages total. I initially didn’t realise that this 16 pages included the cover, so I had to adjust my original plan, which was to produce a square (148x148mm) booklet, and change it to A5 (148x210mm), and rejig the inside pages to fit on 14 pages instead of 16.
The actual files you send to the printer are the cover (which as I say was designed for me by GetCovers, more on that in a minute), plus the inner text file. As I made the page size bigger it meant that I could add a few more photos to illustrate several of the poems. The poems are all short - a maximum of 1 or 2 pages (including photos), and I enjoyed playing around with layout to set them off to their best. I also included an introduction with a brief explanation of each of the poems, as I have always appreciated that in poetry collections - it means a much greater likelihood that I will actually understand the poems! I did all of that in MS Word, then saved it as a pdf file to send to the printer.
GetCovers also did the cover art for my book The Calm Place, so in my brief I gave them a couple of photos (which related to a couple of the things which appear in some of the poems), and asked them to use the same font as with The Calm Place, so that they can go well together and look obviously by the same author. As with The Calm Place, they knocked it out of the park, I was delighted with what they came up with. They are a company based in Ukraine, in effect the ‘kid sister’ of design company MiblArt, and the designers are earlier on in their career. They therefore offer extremely competitive prices whilst giving the talented designers experience and mentoring and the chance to build up their portfolio.
After sending the files to the printer, you get the chance to view the proofs before they print, and then once the proofs are approved you just have to wait till they arrive on your doorstep! I didn’t do an unboxing video (not least because I was on my own when they arrived, and trying to wield both phone and knife at the same time may not have ended well!), but I can tell you that the feeling of pulling out a copy of your book and seeing it for the first time will never get old!
As mentioned above, my plan is to sell the booklet direct. I have already signed up to have a table at a big Stirling Christmas market towards the end of the year, and I think this would make a great stocking filler for poetry lovers! I also want to learn more about marketing so that I can hopefully increase traffic to my Etsy store, and sell them that way too. With any luck this much smaller book may also work as an introduction to The Calm Place, much like many self-published fiction authors who have a free or low-price first book in series in order to encourage people to buy the later books in the series. We’ll see how that goes!
I haven’t put the book up anywhere for sale yet as I’m going to have a short break, but hopefully it will be up in early August - I’ll let you know when it goes live.
I realise this isn’t my usual newsletter fare, but I hope that for any of you considering publishing a small booklet it is helpful.
One of the poems in the booklet is a haiku about the plant life on our back stone wall. I was thinking this week how, although No-Mow May rarely ends up with anything particularly unusual or beautiful growing on our lawn, out the back on the wall all sorts of random life is appearing! As well as the usual maidenhair spleenwort and ivy-leaved toadflax, and the buddleias that refuse to disappear however much I try and cut them down, this year we’ve also had a foxglove, wild strawberries, a rowan sapling (going to have to try and remove that before it causes any damage and move it somewhere where it can properly thrive), and also several ragwort plants. I haven’t seen any cinnabar moth caterpillars on the ragwort yet, but live in hope. It just goes to show how nature can thrive in the most unlikely places!
Have you had any unexpected or new nature appear near you recently?
That’s all for now, I will write more in a couple of weeks. Thank you for reading!
Jackie
Whoop whoop, I found you and know how to comment now xx
brilliant! can't wait to get my hands on this one!