I Want Paper

I have 236 poems, in Paper Screams.  I think that would translate to almost 500 pages, considering a lot are more than a page long, but maybe less.  I haven’t tested that. 

I want to go back and put them all into image files (good fonts, all prettied up).  But I want most to get them on paper.  I want a book.  I don’t think a world-wide publishing campaign is in order.  I just want a dozen or so, to give to people who like the stuff.  Poetry doesn’t sell well until the author is dead, and I have no intention of croaking off any time soon.

But what I’d like is imagery to go with the poetry.  I don’t think I could ever turn out 246 individual paintings to go with this book.  I couldn’t turn out half that many.  I’m just not that much of an artist.  I can imagine the amount of work it would require to do a good job, and it’s not up my alley.  I toyed with the idea of photography, too, but that’s still a huge undertaking.  Maybe less than painting, but still a monumental task. 

But it seems, since I’m such a picture type, that it only makes sense to set up Alana with illustrations.  Plates, like old books have, or maybe sporadic glossies?

And the name?  Alana has personal meaning for me, and that’s about it.  Maybe “Paper Screams, Alana’s Tome,” or something? 

And organizing?  I could do a backward-forward type book where you flip it.  Put the happy stuff on one and the dark on the other.  But there are a lot that don’t clearly fit into either space, and there are a LOT more dark than happy and undetermined combined.  What’s that take to sort out?  Maybe two volumes?  Shadows and Sunlight?  That might work.  Boxed set?

I sure would like to put this stuff to a good block of paper, though.  My bookafile nature just wouldn’t be satisfied with even a hugely successful web-based poetry production.  I want a couple of solid, well-crafted books with all my poetry in.  How to do that?

1. If you do a search for “publish your own book” or something similar, you’ll find dozens of online sites where you can publish your own books in whatever format you like.  I won’t claim it’s cheap, but it can be “within the realm of affordable” if you cut out the extras.  It would, at least, be something to look into.  lulu.com was the first one I clicked on and did a quick price check for U.S. Letter B&W;, Perfect Bound (8.5” x 11") 450 pages, 12 copies, and got a price of $13.53 for each for a total of $162.36. 

   Random settings for the binding, you’d obviously want to be more specific than I was, but at least you get an idea of what it’d take to do it yourself.

   Posted by Liberty on 03/30 at 08:10 PM
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