No problem downloading the Kindle Create app on my Windows computer, or indeed loading the WORD file. It all seems so simple now. The main screen for Kindle Create:left hand column show the structure of the book (+ to expand) and is divided into 5 parts. Title page, Copyright page, Table of Contents (which is created automatically), the actual poems and the back matter. A lot of cutting and pasting and changing formatting (poem title became Chapter Titles). After an hour of two messing about it looked pretty good, The is a preview button on the top right which show me how the finished product would look. It looks ready to go my only concerns are The title page and copyright page are in the Table of Contents, but that’s not really a major issue. The project is now saved. A final ruin through I think before I self publish. More detailed info at kdp.amazon.com/en_us/help

The Independent Publishing Network took their £30 and emailed me back with an ISBN and barcode that should be placed on the bottom right hand corner of the back cover. To me though one of the great advantages of using IPN was that it meant I didn’t have to think up the name of a press. Ace Press, Aldershot City Press, Applewood Press, Arcadia Publishing, Pond Books, Autumn House Press, Bruyno Press, Beacon Publishing, Bonnier Little Press, Book Publishing Of Farnborough, Bright Skies Press. Little Wood Press. I could have spent weeks wasting my time thinking of names.

The useful things I did on my document yesterday were: get rid of any bold (all headings) and italic (twice) styles. For the heading: change to 14pt and centre. Manually insert page numbers at the bottom of the page and centre. There was also the question of which font to use, Garamond, Didot HTF crossed my mind until I found out KDP didn’t like anything fancy, so I stuck with Arial to circle my poems with. I’m so glad the pamphlet is only 24 pages long.

Acknowledgements. There are a number of variations here. Some people seem to be saying that the poems have not been edited since they appeared in a magazine., So I made sure I said “published these poems or versions of them’. There is almost a case for actually naming the editors as well, but no one does, yet at least. When it comes to the magazines some just list them out while others list the magazines and the poem/s that appeared in them. I chose the latter and ended up with: Acknowledgements: Thanks are due to the editors of the following magazines who published these poems, or versions of them: Envoi (‘Youth’, Self-Portrait With Garbo’, ‘Dossing Outside’,’Lonely Nights’, ’Suicide’ and ‘Watching From The Bridge’), Message in a Bottle (‘Methadone’), The Lake (‘Bewildered’ and ‘Good Enough To Bury’), The Reater (‘The Polisher’), Breakfast All Day (’The Dishwasher’), Krax (‘Seeing Himself’ and ‘Arrest’), Prole (‘Consolations’), Headlock (‘Underground’).

Some authors like to thank all the big names they have had a cup of coffee with so you know how well connected they are. Can’t say it impresses me.

The first step must be having something to publish in the first place. I toyed with the idea With the idea of amalgamating my poems about the Black Death but then I thought perhaps I should work on something a little smaller start off with. So I thought about a pamphlet about the groups I saw at the West End Centre, poems with titles from the Gale and Polden back catalogue, from the exhibition Mondo Cane I saw the year before last, or some ekphrastic poems. For some reason, none of them seemed quite right but then I remembered I had a series of about 30 poems about Steve who I used to meet after work and who told me about his life if. That was the one I decided on. I looped closely and decided the 6 poems didn’t fit it and at least three needed major rewriting. I did spend a lot of time thinking of just the right title, “Steve Singing the Black Psalms”, just didn’t seem right other titles I came up with like “Hat in a Hatless World” or even the simple “London Road” didn’t seem to cut it up somehow. But then I thought, after a night’s sleep, I should perhaps change the last poem which was about Steve throwing himself in a river to Steve throwing himself in front of a train and that seemed to chime with what the Samaritans were doing. I’m sure you have seen the notice at railway stations asking you to call the Samaritans to talk before you do anything. “When listening isn’t enough” seemed, right and natural. All I did with Steve was give him a cigarette, letting talk and then I caught the train, I mean I didn’t even know if Steve was his name.

All the poems in the proposed book are in LibreOffice Writer in which you can save files as Word which will then be loaded up to Amazon KDP, which does not recognise, or has limited support for, text boxes, bullets, auto numbering, special fonts, headers and footers, certain word Styles and tables. I inserted 3 pages before the poems. First page is the title and the author which apparently should be centred. The next page should contain the following information:
ISBN:
Publisher:
©2021 Rodney Wood
All rights reserved
Email: rodneytwood@gmail.com

9 Monks Close
Farnborough
Hants
GU14 7DB
Website: https://rodneywoodpoet.wordpress.com
Please direct all enquiries to the author

There is space here to insert the acknowledgements.
Acknowledgements: Thanks are due to the editors of the following magazines who published these poems, or versions of them: Envoi (‘Youth’, Self-Portrait With Garbo’, ‘Dossing Outside’,’Lonely Nights’, ’Suicide’ and ‘Watching From The Bridge’), Message in a Bottle (‘Methadone’), The Lake(‘Bewildered’ and ‘Good Enough To Bury’), The Reater (‘The Polisher’), Breakfast All Day (’The Dishwasher’), Krax (‘Seeing Himself’ and ‘Arrest’), Prole (‘Consolations’),Headlock (‘Underground’).

The third page is for the contents. I created it in LibreOffice using the automatic insert table of contents then cut and pasted it to a blank part of the page and then deleted the table of contents which leftthe title of the poems and the page numbers which had to be justified. The next section was the poems.

I said I’ll come to the ISBN and publisher. For £30 I joined the Independent Publishing Network which gives me an ISBN number and let me list the publisher as the Independent Publishing Network, instead of making up the publisher.

After you’ve been writing a while and sending poems off to magazines you obviously think of the next step, a pamphlet. You try competitions and sending to publishers who may or may not respond. It’s a lot of work, not only finding the right 20 or so poems but also writing about your poetry “experience”. For whatever reason no one is going to take a collection of poems from me and I’ve had over 300 poems published by magazines.

That leaves me two options. Vanity publishers have never appealed. They won’t consult you and they won’t offer much in the way of marketing or distributing the book. They aren’t isn’t interested in selling copies of the book, they doesn’t need to – they’ve already made their profit from the hefty ‘contribution’ fee they charged the author. In saying that if you know what you’re getting into then fine. Self-publishing has been around for years (Virginia Woolf did it, as did Mark Twain and James Joyce. William Blake did nothing else. I’ve also just brought “Collected Poems 2005-2020” by Mitch Sisskind, 150 pages printed by Amazon ) and is a perfectly respectable way to get your book into print. The rise of Kindle Direct Publishing makes the process easier, for an eBook or a print-on-demand book. You are involved in each stage of the process but still have to do your own editing and marketing. Another advantage is the quick publishing time. It’ll be an interesting journey and I’ll post regular blogs along the way.

The first step is to download the Amazon KDP: Complete Guide to Kindle Direct Publishing (Step-by-Step) at https://selfpublishing.com/kdp/ to get an idea about what is involved.