I think of myself primarily as a fantasy writer, yet thanks to my B.A. in creative writing, I’ve dabbled in poetry, flash fiction, short stories, and nonfiction. Though I’ve been writing since I learned how to pick up a pencil, everything I wrote until high school was prose, most of it intended as long fiction.
So since prose is my main game, why did I choose to start my book publishing career with poetry? And why self-publish?
Before I get into this, I want to make it clear that there are benefits I want from both traditional and self-publishing. This is why my longer term career goal is to be a hybrid author. I’m not here to argue that one model is superior to the other.
My Poetry Projects Were Easier to Finish
Most poetry is short, and found poetry is especially short. Forgive Us Our Trespasses and Lest I Know Your Weakness were both side projects–fun experiments in an obscure form of poetry. Their scopes weren’t as grand as a novel, and because of the parameters of the form, editing mostly consisted of curating which pieces worked and which didn’t. For Lest I Know Your Weakness, I had more leeway in deleting lines or combining pieces, but the erasure/blackout form itself doesn’t allow for completely rewriting a piece or adding whatever you want.
So, it didn’t take long at all to finish these books. When I got serious about completing Forgive Us Our Trespasses, I spent maybe 4-6 months from finishing it to publication. Lest I Know Your Weakness went even faster.
Don’t get me wrong. I still dedicated a lot of time and effort into these books. But many of the steps to publication were much more bite-sized.
I Needed the Psychological Boost to Call Myself an Author
While I firmly believe that you’re an author if you’re writing, regardless of whether you’ve published books, I saw an opportunity for my poetry to give me that extra mental step of claiming the label. If I published a book, no one could demean me by calling me “aspiring” or “wannabe,” including myself. I would no longer have to qualify labeling myself as an author by using phrasing like “pre-published.” Having actual books out would make it much simpler.
Language is powerful. What we call ourselves can change how we think. Therefore, finishing and publishing these side projects as real books changed my mindset.
I Had the Technical Skills to Complete All Parts of the Publishing Process
One of many lessons my day job in educational publishing has taught me is how to push through troubleshooting the weirdest assessment platforms and learning management systems. If I could get used to finicky tech tools like that, I could deal with formatting an ebook full of images like I did for Forgive Us Our Trespasses. Was it still tedious? Absolutely. And it wasn’t totally perfect but I’m satisfied with the result.
My day job also taught me to get very comfortable with Adobe, how to work with contractors, and how to execute a publishing project from start to finish. If my day job hadn’t taught me these skills, self-publishing might have felt much too overwhelming and I may not have tried.
I’ve also learned through my day job about the vast amount of texts in the public domain. The source texts for both of my books are in the public domain. If I hadn’t had to spend hours looking through Project Gutenberg texts to source passages for English assessments, I wouldn’t have known of it as a source in the first place.
Blackout and Erasure Poetry are Obscure
The most mainstream attention blackout poetry ever got was in 2010 when Austin Kleon published Newspaper Poetry. This was actually my first exposure to blackout poetry. Aside from that, I didn’t see many paying markets for the form and since poetry is a side project, I didn’t have the patience for the traditional publishing poetry market.
Frankly, I have probably made more money self-publishing my poetry in this obscure form than I would have going down any other route (and I am not rolling in dough). But this is one of the great things about self-publishing and why I want it as part of my career–it’s the perfect space for projects that don’t fit anywhere else.
I Learned How to Do It Myself
Publishing a book is more than writing it. I knew this before, but publishing my poetry books was a fantastic learning process for what a publisher does. From page formatting to cover design to ISBNs and attracting elusive reviewers, these books gave me tangible experiences around everything ELSE that comes with book publishing. This makes me a bit more prepared for when/if I do get into the traditional publishing world.
I Was Willing to Let Go
One reality about publishing is that your first book likely won’t be a runaway best seller. While I’m proud of these books I’ve written, they aren’t so near and dear to me that their current obscurity is soul crushing. They are stepping stones that are only preparing me to make the projects closest to my heart even more successful. I could more easily let these books carry first-timer mistakes (like not having a print option available at the same time as the ebook) without feeling like I’d totally ruined something I was carefully crafting for years. Moreover, there is no perfection, only completion to the best of your abilities. You have to learn to let go no matter which publishing path you take, but when I thought about all of my projects, I was most willing to let these poetry books be my guinea pigs.
Having a Product Gives Me Practice with Marketing and Platforming
It’s hard to practice a lot of the book marketing and platforming advice out there when you don’t have books out. I’d read all about connecting with reviewers, how often to make promotional tweets, and a host of other tips, but I didn’t have any reason to do it until I had books of my own. Since publishing my books, it’s been much easier reaching out to podcasts and book clubs that might be interested in my work. I got very thoughtful and nice reviews from a book club for Lest I Know Your Weakness because I had something tangible to give them when I reached out. Now that I’ve made that connection, I feel more confident that in the future I can reach out to them about reviewing any new books that fit the focus of their club.
I’m Free to Connect My Books to Other Areas of My Life
Recently, I made a really neat connection between my author life and my day job. I gave one of my clients samples from Forgive Us Our Trespasses to accompany an activity we developed for them. I plan on writing a separate blog post about this, but I’ll say here that the nice thing about having self-published my poems is that I didn’t have to consult anyone else about doing this before offering the option to the client.
For me, self-publishing was the right decision for those projects. How about you? If you’re self-published or thinking about self-publishing, what are your reasons for choosing that path?