My Spur-of-the-Moment Chapbook
Will Hindmarch is a freelance writer, graphic designer, and game designer with more than 60 published credits in books and magazines. He's currently designing a new RPG for Pelgrane Press. He also blogs at the game/story outfit, Gameplaywright, at his home venue, The Gist, and at a tumblelog, the Word Studio Notebook.
Last night I got frustrated with some writing I'm doing for a client, so I turned to myself and I said, "Put something out into the world. Something that's yours." So I took an hour and I put together a little poetry chapbook, consisting of five poems found in a Cessna Manual of Flight. This isn't about that, so much, but it abuts the chapbook enough that I'll put up links to it:
- "Lift and Drag" at Issuu (Flash).
- "Lift and Drag" at Lulu (PDF).
For more about the chapbook proper, you can read this post on my blog.What I came here to talk about, in Jeff's space, was how easy it was to put this thing in front of people. The whole process, from layout to publication, not including explanatory blog posts, took about 60 minutes, and that includes rewriting one of the poems so it didn't audibly suck. The Internet's pretty rad. I'm not sure if you'd heard.Here are the sites I used, then:Lulu.com you've probably already heard of — it's the print-on-demand (POD) outlet favored by folks like Internet sensation Wil Wheaton and numerous other small-press and independent authors. I know several great indie game designers who use it, like Greg Stolze (for his political fantasy RPG, Reign), but it's also good for just producing calendars or photo books as gifts. Ignore the sometimes lackluster storefronts. Print quality is high (but not free from POD's occasional hiccups) overall.
But I wasn't concerned with print quality here, of course, because I just released my little nine-page doodad as an ebook, which is free to do through Lulu. Make an account, follow the publishing steps laid out for you for ebooks, one at a time, and you could have your chapbook or article or whatever out for download without taxing your own web server. Feed them a Word document or rich text file, if you want, and their systems will take care of it. What I forgot is that Lulu wants a cover for the ebook, and doesn't just use the front page of the file for it, so either be ready to accept a formulaic stock cover or be ready with your own cover image to supplant theirs. The one on my chapbook is a reconstruction of the file's cover page, and won't print for shit, but it's just for screen viewing anyway. (I had only given myself about an hour to work with, remember.)Alas, since Lulu seems to track sales only of for-pay products, I can't tell how many copies of my chapbook have been downloaded. It's possible I'm missing some key ticker somewhere.Issuu.com, in contrast, is a glossy, Flash-powered outlet for online reading, especially well suited to page-flipping and quick browsing. It's more for magazines than books, and more for casual dipping than prolonged reading, in my opinion. But it sure is handsome.Built to blend social networking with web publishing, Issuu isn't the mock-bookshop experience that Lulu is. (Lulu is a genuine bookseller, but I don't know anyone who shops Lulu the way they do Amazon or their local brick-and-mortar store.) Issuu seems to work fine for browsing and perusal, but I like how easy it is to get a nicely specific URL and slick reader experience out of it. Just feed them your file (PDF, DOC, RTF, and others accepted), fill out some details for the project, and you're off. I like it well enough that I periodically look for new ways to make use of Issuu, just so I can play with it.Both of these sites require you to register, because this is the 21st century and it's all email and passwords now.Were these the best ways to put my work in front of people? I don't know. They were effective and accessible on my very tight deadline, I know that. Since I released my chapbook this morning at 10am, I've gotten a very modest number of downloads, some very nice messages from readers I respect, and a single, small donation.I like to think of it as me paying for a couple of beers with some poems I wrote.