Self-Publishing: the Cover is Done!

So now it feels like we're getting somewhere. The cover has been finalized! Whoo-hoo. Now goes the cycles of fixing the innards.

There are some benefits to having a parental publisher. We talked about this somewhat when we talked about the pros and cons in our first post about self-publishing. The publishing business is changing and DIYers are now poised to take advantage of that in a forceful way. But it is a lot of work. And if you don't put in the work, it shows.

There's a local publisher in my hometown who I met with once. They sent me a letter full of typos and I went in to talk to them. They do two kinds of publishing: what I call "parental publishing" (traditional publishing) and they are also what Mark Levine calls a subsidy publisher (you pay them to step you through POD publishing). What you get with them is basically an imprint logo to live behind…but little else. You do get copious amounts of layout calamities and typos (at least in all six books of theirs I've seen). And it was this experience meeting with them (along with a year-long market study and my own track record with DIY) that inspired me to go ahead and do-it-myself. Even though this meant I was the one filing for my own copyright. I was the one correcting round after round of proofs and solving layout problems.

In the home stretch, this included deciding how my titles would lay above my poems, where the page numbers would display, suppressing page numbers, choosing page alignments, adding back material to the book to ensure a good-looking spine. Otherwise, my book would look more like a chapbook.

I also had to proof my apostrophes and quotation marks to make sure they were displaying right, my hyphens, my paragraph justifications and indents, italicized words, where poems would break from page to page. After every change I had to redo my own Table of Contents and recheck it. I had to make sure names were spelled right and decide if this book was either the poetry of Mary McCray or poems by Mary McCray. I had to make sure our imprint logo looked swell on the cover. I had to nudge the artists to see if the artwork was getting done. I had to shell out some cash to have the book proofread.

I had to start looking at books of poetry on my bookshelf in an entirely new way.