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.
Rodney Wood 