Why?
I have just completed my third novel. While it is with my Editor, I decided that I'd like to try something before starting another novel. I have decided to self-publish a small book of poetry.
About whom?
A few years ago I wrote some poems about the Irish women I had been researching for characters for my novels. At the time I was also working on my Masters in Creative Writing and poetry was part of the course, so I wrote short poems about these fascinating women.
Anyway, I submitted a collection of twelve poems to a competition, got nowhere, and left the work saved on my laptop. I also had a hard copy printed out and I came across that in a folder recently.
What to do?
I began thinking about how to self-publish it. I am now on my third self-published novel, and it's not been too difficult.
The main problem for me, is that it is so expensive to get a professional cover designed. I've just signed up with a designer for a cover for my latest novel, which I'm happy to invest in. But with a small book of poetry, I'd never sell enough copies to pay for the cover design.
I decided to look at designing my own cover. To keep it simple, I would design just a front cover for an e-book.
Internet.
I sell my novels mostly on Amazon and KDP. Many of the sales I achieve are for e-books and Kindle. I would be happy to sell just a few copies of my poetry, so in a way, this is an experiment with a different kind of writing and a simpler way of selling my work.
How?
For my novels I used Reedsy, and uploaded my pdf and epub file to KDP.
However, I wanted to use something different for the short form of writing that is poetry. I did some online searches and ended up back to KDP. It looks the simplest option and I decided to give it a try.
First, I needed to format my poems into a book. I researched some YouTube videos and saw that I could import the document I already have on my laptop. I copied and pasted a Docx into Kindle Create (with the help of the video).
Here it is! Set out in chapters.
When?
This needs a lot more work and a cover, but I feel that I can do this. I set myself a target of this April, 2023. (Cover permitting!)
Wish me luck!