Many thanks to Curtis Dunlap for featuring my latest Palmetto Trail poem, Swamp Fox Passage, at Blogging Along Tobacco Road.
Showing posts with label publishing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label publishing. Show all posts
20 December 2009
07 August 2009
e-chapbooks
Visit 2River to sample their e-chapbooks. The newest e-chap is ˆHow the World Was Made by Christien Gholson.
05 August 2009
trying to publish a poetry e-book
Instead of publishing my first full-length poetry book in the traditional way, I decided I would go all-digital, no paper unless a reader decides to print a hard copy. Factors contributing to my decision include my wish for as many people as possible to read my poems, my geek longing to learn how to create an electronic book, my unwillingness to pay contest fees, my unwillingness to wait a year (or forever) for a publisher to select the manuscript and release the book; and my wish not burden the economy with cost and the planet with pollution caused by paper, ink, printing, inventory, and shipping.
When I began to convert my manuscript from Microsoft Word to PDF, webpage, and Kindle formats, I assumed it would be difficult and it might have been had the text been prose and not poetry. The key problems I encountered were inter-line and intra-line spacing, indents, special characters like em dashes and diacritical marks, and the table of contents. Microsoft Word is a horror, but there is not a replacement yet.
Converting to Kindle format was the most difficult because their converter does not give detailed error reports, and their Kindle previewer is not a full function previewer. Hyperlinks, for example, do not work. Nonetheless, I've done it, although I won't know for sure how well I've done it until I submit the book to Amazon and read it on my Kindle.
I will publish a how-to-guide when I'm finished.
When I began to convert my manuscript from Microsoft Word to PDF, webpage, and Kindle formats, I assumed it would be difficult and it might have been had the text been prose and not poetry. The key problems I encountered were inter-line and intra-line spacing, indents, special characters like em dashes and diacritical marks, and the table of contents. Microsoft Word is a horror, but there is not a replacement yet.
Converting to Kindle format was the most difficult because their converter does not give detailed error reports, and their Kindle previewer is not a full function previewer. Hyperlinks, for example, do not work. Nonetheless, I've done it, although I won't know for sure how well I've done it until I submit the book to Amazon and read it on my Kindle.
I will publish a how-to-guide when I'm finished.
02 December 2008
29 September 2008
if: the future of books
If you haven't already, start reading if: book. Dan Piepenbring's cogent remarks on high school yearbooks vs Facebook.
27 April 2008
poetry contests
[from Ron Silliman's blog]
I think for a lot of young writers, in particular, especially those coming out of MFA mills (and especially the programs that don’t quite “get” contemporary poetry, which is to say most of them), I think the transition to becoming a practicing writer can be a daunting, even crushing task. It’s when most people stop writing. They find that the context they had for poetry in school no longer exists in the “real” world and don’t know how to build one out of whole cloth. These are the people for whom contests exist, and it’s why I think they’re ultimately damaging. For one thing, the odds are preposterous. For another, unless they actually know the work of the judge, and know who the judge is, there is no way to ascertain if there is any reasonable expectation of even being competitive. They send in their money and their manuscript, they hope and they can feel crushed if they lose, sometimes again & again & again. Where if they would just get together with their friends and publish one another, they would be making enormous headway much more quickly. And their books would be reaching the right audiences. Which is (again) why it’s far better to have a volume published by Pressed Wafer, if you’re a New England poet, than in the Yale Younger Poets Series.
I think for a lot of young writers, in particular, especially those coming out of MFA mills (and especially the programs that don’t quite “get” contemporary poetry, which is to say most of them), I think the transition to becoming a practicing writer can be a daunting, even crushing task. It’s when most people stop writing. They find that the context they had for poetry in school no longer exists in the “real” world and don’t know how to build one out of whole cloth. These are the people for whom contests exist, and it’s why I think they’re ultimately damaging. For one thing, the odds are preposterous. For another, unless they actually know the work of the judge, and know who the judge is, there is no way to ascertain if there is any reasonable expectation of even being competitive. They send in their money and their manuscript, they hope and they can feel crushed if they lose, sometimes again & again & again. Where if they would just get together with their friends and publish one another, they would be making enormous headway much more quickly. And their books would be reaching the right audiences. Which is (again) why it’s far better to have a volume published by Pressed Wafer, if you’re a New England poet, than in the Yale Younger Poets Series.
19 June 2006
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