A personal project I have already started working on is self-publishing a poetry book. I have been writing and collecting my poems for about 6 years at this point, and I have always wanted to publish them in a finished book. What I hope to gain from it is personal fulfillment — I have loved writing poetry for years because of how therapeutic it is and it is something that brings me genuine joy. The ability to add some aspect of physicality to that aspect of my life would be a feeling unlike any other for me.
I think I need around 10 months–a year to finish the project. Although I have a majority of my poems already typed into a master Google doc, they’re truly scattered in a plethora of locations. I have had several journals at this point, and there are poems in all of them. It would take me at least 2 months to locate and transfer all of my writing into my doc.
After that, editing is a lengthy process. I have over 100 poems already typed up, and I imagine I have close to the same amount scattered throughout the journals I have kept. Between editing them all and scrapping the ones I don’t want to include (at least in this book) will take around 3 months.
Once all of the poems have been edited and sifted through, the next thing I would need to do is compile them into an order I feel flows nicely and tells an overall story. This can be done somewhat quicker, I’m estimating 2–3 weeks.
In addition to just the poems, I also want to include simple, single-line illustrations for a majority of them. This task alone will take 2-3 months, between deciding which poems I want to draw them for, sketching them out, and finalizing them.
After this, I would need to lay everything out in InDesign. Due to the sheer mass of text and images, I am going to have, I estimate this will take me another 1–2 months. Finally, I would upload the final file to Amazon self-publishing. I already have the front and back covers done, so that is a task I don’t need to worry about. Uploading everything to Amazon is free, but I would like to buy my own copy of the book for myself to have. I can’t imagine the final price would be anything more than $15.
