GO PUBLISH YOURSELF!
One of my old alma maters, The Parkersburg News, has a story this morning by Rachel Lane about a Paden City teacher who has written a book of poetry.
Belinda Slider-Baker’s “Psychological Melody of Words” is available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
The News mentions that Slider-Baker is spreading the love of poetry to her students in a short class. Wonderful! A reviewer at Amazon calls the book “beautifully inspirational,” and then says, “Belinda Slider-Baker expresses in words what can only be felt in the deepest part of the heart. You will smile and cry. This collection of poems is an inspiration to women in every walk of life. I highly recommend this book for personal enjoyment as well as the perfect gift for anyone you care about.”
One Cecile J. Fiest calls the book “a must read.” Topics range from friendship to endometriosis. Self-published by Publish America, whose president and co-founder Larry Clopper calls the company calls itself “a traditional, advance- and royalty-paying book publisher.”
The other day a friend and I talked about her new children’s book which went right up on the Internet, without the blessing of a big-time publisher.
I easily think of other examples of non-traditional publishing ventures, but will tell here of just a few.
Poet José Alejandro Peña from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, edits The Refined Savage Poetry Review and offers his books in digital, Internet-available, page-turning form. Pena has been a grad student at Marshall who seems to have vanished, at least to our circle of friends. Can’t track him down. José, if you’re out there, give me a call. But I digress.
Another example: a chapbook called “A Place of … Amazing Grace” came out in 2006 to benefit a miners assistance fund and the families left behind after Sago. Many writers are bypassing a Gutenberg, dead-tree technology altogether and publishing their books digitally as PDFs and/or on blogs or other Internet technology. So the elitist book industry is beginning to crack, and all sorts of books are available. While Publish America is not quite a traditional book publisher, it is, along with iUniverse and Lulu, taking publishing in a new direction. Even Amazon has a similar service called Create Space.
