Poetic Shutterbug

For a while now I have had a poetry manuscript ready to be published. As always I went to Shadow Poetry first as I had with my two previous chapbooks only to find that I could not afford their prices and decided to wait until I had enough money saved to publish my third poetry book. As you know I won a contest with The Publishing Maven a couple of months ago and Christy sent me her book The Step-By-Step Guide to Self Publishing for Profit. I read the entire book, cover to cover and was simply blown away by her book. It is the most comprehensive, concise and detailed guide to self publishing that I have ever read. She describes in detail how to use createspace which is a division of Amazon.com and is a FREE, yes I said FREE, self publishing venue for anyone who is looking to publish a book. Upon finishing her book I immediately went to createspace to check out the site and found exactly how easy it was to create my book by just uploading my files and making a few decisions as...

The chapbook was created around the nineteenth century. It was named after writers who would peddle their writing collections on the street. Writers would simply print and write their poetry, ballads and stories on paper, fold the paper in half and sometimes design a sheet of paper with hand drawings and use that as a cover for their book and sell them. Nowadays, it’s much more advanced. Chapbooks are anywhere from 16 to 40 pages long. Anything over 40 pages is considered a full length book. There is software you can purchase for desktop publishing which allows you to make the chapbook yourself. However this can be very time consuming and if you are not computer savvy, like me, it can be a daunting task. There are chapbook publishers who can either offer you publishing alone or offer contests which require an entry fee but if you win the contest they will publish your chapbook. I personally am wary of these contests. First, because you need to send a reading fee which is usu...