i think, in part to notify me that there are currently no pictures of her on my blog, on the blog header, or on the main page.
with buzznet going through some understandable growing pains as they relaunch and their redesigned system, i offer you the picture to the right from our danielle archives.
and now to the mailbag
Hey Tony.
I am publishing a book of my poems and selling them through the blog.
I was wondering if you could impart any wisdom about the self-publishing process, since you’ve put out, what, two Blooks now?
Kinkos n’ mail ’em out myself? Cafe Press? I don’t mind putting in a lot of work if it means the price to the reader is lower.
Any experiences you’ve had would be awesomely helpful.
Thanks.
dear dc,
i have self published five books of poems and one blook. they are both very different things to make.
the easiest form of selfpublishing are poetry chapbooks.
alot of my poems are pretty short, so i was able to take an 8.5″ x 11″ standard peice of paper, fold it, and get two poems per page going.
that means if you have 30 good poems you’d only need about 22 pages to put together a nice little chap book. once you have all the pages printed out and copied, you staple it in the middle with two staples, fold them and mail em out.
total cost about $1 a chapbook.
Blook was harder because each one was 125 pages, so i went to a copy store and had them bind it with that crappy plastic binding that made it look like a college reader.
total cost about $9.
i will be coming out with a new blook hopefully soon.
i plan on doing it through Cafe Press because it will make something that not only actually looks like a real book, but they will collect the money and deal with the shipping and everything.
even though i sold about 150 Blooks within about 4 weeks, i made very little if any profit and it was a royal pain.
cafe press is a reputable company that has already given me one commission check from my lame ass merch store that i set up with them, it seems reasonable to think that i could write something, put it in .PDF, email it to them and have people buy it through the blog.
we’ll see.
good luck on your book!
tp