Publish poetry/illustrations

December 30, 2009 10:19 AM

How to publish my poetry/illustrations?

I have written some poems, with illustrations. I am thinking of how to publish these. Any constructive comments welcome.

I am not interested in self-publishing due to the upfront cost and the lack of a distribution network.
Traditional publishing doesn't seem to be an option either in that it seems nearly impossible to get published without having been published already and also publishers are not interested in being given writing AND illustration.

The format of these is similar to that of a children's picture book, though the writing is not for children (not bawdy or anything, just adult level). Each poem is about 12 lines long, and a spread consists of an illustration on the left-hand page and the corresponding line is on the right hand page. I have implemented these in Flash Page Flip, if only to see how they look. The illustrations are ink on paper which I have scanned.

One possible route would be to publish in e-book form (Kindle? other?). This would require formatting, don't know anything about it, but it looks like there is info on how to do that. Also, might require reformatting the spreads, ie one page would have both text and illustration, which is doable. I don't have a Kindle, so I couldn't test the final result. I could publish one for cheap or free and see how it goes.

I have considered implementing them in Android. I can do the programming part. But I'm not sure that the medium would work due to the small screen size. At the very least, the illustrations would have to be redone.

posted by allelopath to computers & internet (5 answers total)

Self-publishing via Lulu.com or Blurb.com is both flexible and easy and you can promote your book for sales direct to consumers for online sales. I think that is what most people with this type of project do these days since, as you say, traditional publishing is so inaccessible.
posted by DarlingBri at 10:53 AM on December 30, 2009 [1 favorite]

I run an online magazine where we do a lot of intertextual stuff, and have published a couple of poems together with illustrations that were intended to go with them (or vice versa). Link in my profile; feel free to submit.
posted by bingo at 11:06 AM on December 30, 2009

Before you pull the trigger, you can get lots of good feedback, encouragement and advice at the Poetry Free-For-All. I'm sure there must be several threads about this over there!
posted by aquafortis at 11:16 AM on December 30, 2009

You could sell them as PDFs online: ways to do this have been discussed a couple of times on AskMeFi.
posted by James Scott-Brown at 4:52 AM on December 31, 2009

Thanks for the responses. Several new things here to investigate. I've delved into Kindle further. It turns out that the display for Kindle (or any ebook) is not color, so that eliminates those.
posted by allelopath at 3:14 PM on January 1, 2010