Category / Blog

by Carol J Forrester

Self-Publishing: Planning A Launch, Holding The Proof

Back in June I talked about my plans to self-publish my poetry collection, in a post I called To Self-Publish Or Not To Self-Publish? That Is The Sleep Depriving Question. In all honesty, it really was a tough decision to make, and I questioned myself every time I told someone I was self-publishing because I almost always got the same response.

‘Oh, why have you decided to go down that route?’

At that point in the conversation I could point them towards the blog post where I list all the reasons I decided to go down that route.

Of course it wasn’t all smooth sailing from writing that post to finalising the manuscript. There were moments where I wondered if I was making a huge mistake and if I had made the right decision to following this path. However, today I finally felt that it was all worth it. Today I got to hold the proof copy of my poetry collection in my hands.

 

There are still a few tweaks to be made before I’m happy to hit that publish button. The font for the page numbering needs adjusting and I want to give all the poems one last run through for typos, but overall I’m really happy with how this book has turned out.

I have to say a massive thank you to Caroline Layzell for designing the cover, and to Helen Kay for helping to edit the collection and Deborah Edgeley for helping to blurb it.

Now I’m moving on to planning the launch night (November 30th) and finding poetry events to read a few of the poems at. The book itself should be available to buy from the 30th November onward.

It’s real, I’m holding it, and I’m very happy that I did decide to go down the route of self-publishing. I’m not losing sleep anymore.

by Carol J Forrester

Not A Word To Waste, The Horror Of Redrafts #WeekendCoffeeShare

This weekend the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Challenge is taking place. Last month I posted my entry for the second challenge of the first round: Stolen Silence and at the moment I’m working on redrafting my submission for the first challenge of this year’s first round.

Redrafting is the part of the process where you quite often find yourself doubting that you have any ability to put one work in front of the other at all. You find typos, spelling mistakes, words that you didn’t even know existed. Tenses switch back and forth, character names suddenly change, and out of nowhere you move from mountains to city surroundings. Editing is where all your mistakes come to the forefront and you have to go back and fix them.

If you’re luck you will have brilliant people who will help you with your redrafts and edits. These people (if you can find the ones that will give you an honest review rather than just ‘yeah mate, good job’) are invaluable for getting your past that snow-blind stage where you can’t see the words for the prose. Distance from your work can help, but I often find a fresh pair of eyes will pick apart of poem or story far more effectively than I ever could.

I’ve been very luck, I’ve always had friends who were interested in reading and writing so I’ve always had people to run work past. At the moment there is someone reading my poetry collection ‘All In The Blood’ for me, and someone else who has been giving feedback on my NYC submission. For both it has been less about being told what is wrong with my writing, or what is right, but about being challenged to look at my work through a different lens. More often than not this means I go back and take another shot at saying whatever it was I was trying to say.

So, my top tips for editing and redrafting.

  • Try not to send out first drafts. Do a little redrafting yourself before exposing your child to the elements.
  • Remember that you’re asking someone for their opinion. You don’t have to agree with it, but you asked for it so be polite when they give it.
  • Think about the comments your editor makes and even if you don’t go in that direction, think about why they have been made. You might find it sends you off down a different avenue of thought.
  • If your story has an element that you’re not familiar with in it, try finding someone who is familiar. I don’t always believe in the ‘write what you know’ but you should at least ‘write what you’ve researched’.

Now, enough procrastinating, I have a story to redraft, a poetry collection to edit, and a novel to corral. As they say, no sleep for the writer.

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by Carol J Forrester

To Self-Publish Or Not To Self-Publish? That Is The Sleep Depriving Question #WeekendCoffeeShare

About five years ago I self-published a collection of poetry through lulu.

I made exactly nothing despite apparently selling at least one book through amazon (according to the less that encouraging review posted), and in the end I retired the project.

The experience taught me a number of important things.

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  1. Lulu is not the way to go if you want to sell a physical book on Amazon and make any margin.
  2. I am not a good enough editor. I need to outsource this element to avoid the number of typos and mistakes that were in the last book.
  3. Reading poems you wrote five or more years ago can be a painful experience. Especially when you realise the bad review hit the nail directly on the head.

So why am I about to give self-publishing another shot?

Well clearly I’m a glutton for punishment.

When I published ‘Before The Words Run Out’ there were thirty-two poems, a series of haiku, and some pieces of flash fiction (all of which can be found somewhere in the depths of this blog). For ‘It’s All In The Blood’ I wanted to create a collection of just poems, and ensure that the majority of them were not poems I’d already published to Writing and Works. Some have appeared elsewhere, such as on Ink Sweat and Tears, but for the most part the collection will be new pieces with a few favourites from the site sprinkled in.

The unfinished draft is sitting at forty-seven poems (it was forty-eight but I axed a poem which I didn’t feel was good enough). I was aiming to cut the collection off at fifty poems (because I like round numbers) but the final number is likely to be higher now as my recent dive back into the local poetry communities means I’m writing a lot of stuff and I’m actually really happy with most of the work I’m producing.

I am editing as I’m writing. As this is not a novel, I’m free to go back and amend, rewrite, obliterate poems as I see fit without changing the entire plot or flow of the book. This back and forth between writing and editing also means that I don’t get snow blind with my poems. It’s very easy to write something, go over it straight away and be like ‘Yeah, that’s good enough’.

No. No it is not.

I’ve got a couple of friends who are helping me with the next round of editing. Both are writers themselves, one of which has done some work in editing. Both are brutally honest and of the opinion that if they don’t say it someone else will, so it’s better coming from them.

There is a small part of me who wants to find the guy who gave me the bad review on my last collection and show him the new one. I want the chance for him to say ‘you’ve improved, well done’. (But that would be bowing to my need for approval and I’m trying very hard to shake that particular dog-turd off my shoe.)

I have been considering traditional publishing but quite honestly, I feel like I need to prove to myself that I can conquer self-publishing. This is unlikely to be my last poetry collection, I’m only twenty-five and it’s not even my first attempt. Even if this bites the dust then I will still come away with more experience that if I’d not tried at all.

IMG_1745The aim is to have the collection finished and ready to publish by autumn. (I will not specify when in autumn because ‘wiggle-room’). The title has been picked, I’m making tentative enquiries about possible cover designs with arty friends, and I’ve settled on using the Amazon self-publishing platform to produce and sell the book. It almost looks like I have a book and a plan. Almost.

A little further down the line (i.e when the book is done) I’ll be looking to do some sort of book blog tour but that is only a very small flicker on the enormous fairy-light display in my brain at the moment. For the most part I am focused on the writing and the torture that is rewrites.

In the meantime feel free to bombard me with any of your own experiences self-publishing, traditionally publishing, or just poetry writing in general. How do you balance writing poetry for a blog v poetry for a collection/competitions. Let me know in the comments below.

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by Carol J Forrester

New Notepads, NaPoWriMo And Open Mic Nights #WeekendCoffeeShare

March turned into a slower month than planned for me and I’m not entirely sure why that was. Perhaps it was the expectation for April and NaPoWriMo, or the relief of getting my submission in to The Poetry Business for their Book and Pamphlet Competition. Either way, I didn’t really write much in the second half of March and I feel a little guilty for letting myself slip into old habits for those two weeks. On the other hand, I’d managed to be pretty productive during January and February in terms of submissions to journals and competitions, and March isn’t particular busy when it comes to deadlines, so if you’re going to pick a month to kick back, March would be it.

April has been busy with NaPoWriMo kicking off and the first week is just about to come to a close. So far I have managed to post a-poem-a-day for the prompts provided and unlike some years, I’ve found myself connecting with the official prompts. Previously I’ve sat there staring at the screen wondering how on earth I’m going to come up with something but this year I seem to have found my flow. All my NaPoWriMo poems so far can be found under the poetry category of this site, and I even preformed my response for the Early Bird Prompt at the Shrewsbury Poetry Night. My sister was brilliant enough to video the set so if you want to take a look you can see it below.

I would like to do some more poetry readings this year as I’d forgotten just how much I actually enjoy them. They are a fantastic space to voice poetry in, but you also get to connect with fellow poets and listen to some amazing work from other writers.

While I’ve signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo, the actual amount of writing I’ve done it pretty minimal. Each time I sit down to the computer I seem to hit a wall and pushing past is proving to be troublesome.

Overall I’m trying not to beat myself up about my lack of progress with my novel as I’ve been writing more poetry and it looks like I should have a full length manuscript by the end of the year if not before then. If I don’t get anywhere with the pamphlet competitions I’m going to look into self-publishing again. I self-published ‘Before The Words Run Out’ so I know I can do it, I just want make sure that I’m 100% happy with the content this time. Either way, there will be a poetry collection coming soon. I just hope there  will be people who want to read it.

by Carol J Forrester

#WeekendCoffeeShare – Submissions, Publications And Getting On With It

wordswag_15073188796611453091488It’s been almost a month since I wrote a WeekendCoffeeShare post so I feel like I’m probably overdue an entry. My last post was January 13th, less than two weeks into a new year, and now we’re chasing towards the middle of February with the same chaotic speed that always comes with being busy. One of my goals for 2019 was to try and get some more poems and short stories published online and continue putting myself forward for writing competitions. So far this seems to be going relatively well.

While I didn’t get anywhere in the Write Out Loud poetry competition that I entered in December, the two poetry submissions I made to The Drabble and Ink Sweat & Tears were both accepted and have now been published. ‘Until The Light Gets In’ went up in January and ‘Newborn‘ was published this morning. I’m now in the process of working on my next round of submissions for a few other sites and journals in the hopes that I can keep this momentum going.

Aside for these submissions I’ve continued posting poems and stories to Writing and Works. My poem ‘Man Up And Carry On‘ sparked some fantastic discussion in the comments section which I really enjoyed reading. It also had me thinking about a blog post I read about ‘What Makes A Blog Post Successful‘, is it the views, the likes, or the comments. How do we judge ‘success’ in blogging. For me I would say my most successful posts are the ones like ‘Man Up And Carry On’ as they generate interaction not only between myself and readers, but between the readers themselves. As a writer, one of your goals is to make the reader think about the things you’re writing about, you want them to take something away and mull it over. When you can see a comment thread continuing two, or three days later, you know that you have achieved this.

lmcfeb2019One of the submissions that I sent off today was my entry for the Bath Flash Fiction Award. Since I submitted on the last day of the window I got a lovely email telling me that I qualified for their ‘Last Minute Club’ badge. I didn’t intend to be quite so last minute about it but this week ended up being far busier and far more tiring than I expected so there was a bit of a mad dash today to finalize my redraft and to get it in. I managed it though and I can now say that I met my target of submitting an entry to a competition that I’ve been meaning to get around to since last year’s competition.

For the rest of February I’ll be doing much the same as I’ve been doing for January, just without the bout of lurgy at the end of the month hopefully. I want to add at least one more poem to my collection draft, submit to a couple more journals, start and finish chapter two for my novel re-write (I finally completed chapter one last weekend), and get on with studying for the next module in my AAT qualifications. I won’t have the results for my first two exams until March but I can keep going with the next three modules while I wait.

I will also be preforming one poem at a local arts event next Saturday and I’ve been invited to perform a five minute slot at the Shrewsbury Poetry Night in April so I seem to be getting back into the swing of live readings which I’m very happy about.

For those of you out there reading this, how has 2019 gone so far for you? Are you keeping on top of those resolutions and goals, or have you found that they’ve changed as the year got underway? More importantly, have you managed to achieve something that brings you joy? It can be small or big, what matters is that it makes you smile when you tell someone about it. Take a moment to revel in your victories. Until next time, thanks for reading and all the best for February. I hope you find a way to make this month your own.