Today I’m making final preparations for my new book, Poetry from the Edge of the Apocalypse, to launch (the date will be announced within the next week). As I’m wrapping up the myriad of loose ends I can’t help but think about the immense amount of work involved with self-publishing a book. I always seem to forget what an emotionally charged time these final hours are. I’m developing a minor case of the good old heebie jeebies, the pre-launch jitters.
As I always do, I tally up how much of my own money I’ve invested in the project and try to pinpoint my “break even” point—how many copies I’ll need to sell to recoup all the costs associated with the book design, production, and marketing. This doesn’t even take into account how much of my time was involved in the writing of almost a hundred poems, I couldn’t even begin to tally that up. On paper none of it makes any sense, it seems like a guaranteed losing proposition. The process is not glamorous. It takes a whole lot of optimism and love to even go through with one of these launches.
It turns out the magic number this time it is about two-hundred paperback copies, that’s the amount that will have to sell just to break even. Two hundred readers will have to like my writing enough to spend $15.99 of their hard-earned money on my book. Although that might not sound like a big hurdle to clear, believe me when I tell you it’s much more difficult than you can imagine if you’ve never published.
The Catch-22 about the self-publishing experience today is that it's easier than ever to publish but the flipside of that is the competition for readers’ ever-diminishing attention is insanely fierce. When doubts start to creep in I remind myself I don’t do this for the money. I write solely for the love of the craft, there’s nothing in this world quite like it.
This line by Ernest Hemingway serendipitously showed up in one of my social media feeds today. Book sales are a way of keeping score but halfway through my first decade doing this I realized the true reward in this profession wasn't the royalties or accolades. If that were the case, I would have walked away from writing a long time ago. As I look back over the past three decades I can clearly see that writing has provided me with more things of substance than any other single thing ever has or even could. Writing, for me, is an addiction that no recovery program could cure me of—a day without it doesn’t even feel complete.
It makes me cringe to think that some of the people buying my book(s) might feel like they’re contributing to a GoFundMe campaign. I hope readers aren’t buying a copy of my books because they feel like they need to support my work. I don't want the books to never be read and just collect dust on a shelf. Like any creative person I sometimes have my doubts about what kind of value my work is providing, especially before a launch. After thirty years the heebie jeebies aren’t as bad but they’re still present even if they’re just sometimes a passing thought (worry).
Above all, it’s my sincere hope that my poetry has the ability to make people feel something—spark a smile, rekindle some fond memory, or maybe provide a peaceful moment of reflection. There are far too many people walking around in this world feeling numb, disconnected, or devoid of any light or positive emotions whatsoever. Poetry can be very good medicine for this modern-day epidemic. Writing poetry has the same medicinal effect on me and that’s a big part of the reason I’ve never stopped.
Well, now that I have all that off of my chest I feel a little bit better. For the moment the heebie jeebies have retreated. This is just a small glimpse into how the sausage is made so to speak. I’ll take a deep breath and plow through the final few lingering tasks before pre-sales begin. I’m just waiting on the designer to finalize the eBook version of the book. The pre-sales and launch dates will be announced very soon—of course, I’ll announce this on Hive first!
As always, thanks for reading!
(Gif sourced from Giphy.com)
