the long journey
Today I was packing up some new orders for copies of GRANATA and marveling the two years it took to get from project inception to finished book. Or nearly two years, those very first poems in the series written during my first summer of freedom in 2022 and finished before fall. Or the collages that started coming hard and fast just last summer that form a good portion of the book. While I love all my books in their own way, this is the first full-length project that fully integrates text and image in the same way my zines have done in the past and it turned out lovely, the printed images far better than I can do on my little home printer. While it was costlier, both for the full-color images inside and the irregular shape of the book (similar to DARK COUNTRY in its larger, squarish-ness) it was more than worth it. While I initially toyed with making it hardcover, I settled on paper since that would have added several additional dollars to the bottom line and nearly erased any profit. I may however use it for future projects or special editions in the future.
In early 2022, I was doing a lot of lesson writing work about the Greeks and Romans with epics like The Odyssey and The Aeneid. There was so much talk of the hero's journey and formats and centering of the male experience even while the stories of the women, both goddesses and mortals, were so much more interesting. I started thinking, what does a female epic look like? It's structure and tone? Episodes and trajectories? I'd written about mythology before, poems about figures like Cassandra and Daphne and Calypso. Or the modern re-imagining of the minotaur myth set in the midwest in my Taurus series, which coincidentally bore the same name as the now lost and thankfully forgotten first book I ever pulled together in the late 90s, not specifically about myths, but full of them at a time where I had very little to write about the world in my own experience at only 25.
The road was both swift and long over those two years. First there was actually writing the poems, which I remember penning with an intent for a longer project, though in the end, the project felt finished a little below standard length for a full-length. With only the text portions, I thought I might just have a chapbook on my hands, but once the images, over 20 were in the mix, the book was much larger and was possibly worth doing a full-length format for. The title, the Italian word for "grenade" came from a line in one of the early pieces,
"A girl is a grenade, is a garden full of bramble and weeds."
The cover was initially a collage using a classical Persephone image, but in one of my first forays into playing with image generators, I reproduced a similar image, which I then combined with other clips and stock images to get the cover we see today. At that point, the square format seemed to be best for that cover design, so I went forward with plans for that.
When it comes to self-publication, whatever your genre, there are some tried and trues. While I am not the best editor for my work, those years of terrible workshops have made me hesitant to ask for advice on the writing itself, but do always at least try to get a second set of eyes on the mss. before I start laying it out to get rid of typos and punctuation eras. This was true with traditionally published books that involved editors. Each new pass, whether it was the pre-pub version or the final galleys, inevitably leads to more pesky error discoveries. I've learned to accept, months later, I will discover something else that made it though many sets of eyes, whether the publisher's or my own. The great thing about ordering books in small batches is I can adjust for future printings.
Marketing a self-published volumes is perhaps the most difficult part, though there are times when I would say the margin adjustments are the things that are killing me. Like with chapbooks, I get the hang a little more with each go. However, the formatting for a perfect bound is a little trickier with gutters that are deeper and require more care. While publishers deal with things like advance promo, review copies, distribution, all of these things fall on the author, though they too grow easier with each new book. There is something lovely to making significantly more on every book than conventional royalties allow and having complete control over details and timelines that my brain likes particularly and now, while I love my past publishers, the ones that still exist, I am not sure I will go back to traditional publishing unless its a project in a wholly different genre that I think would benefit by having a much wider scope than I can provide, like essays or memoir or fiction. Poetry feels like such a small thing, and I love being able to sell signed copies directly and exclusively. I also get to include bonuses like postcards and prints that fit each book.
I've been thinking a bit about these things as I begin prep work for RUINPORN, for which I already have the manuscript ready for a round of editing and a prelim cover design. Depending on how that process goes, it could be out before the end of the year. While I like a little more spacing between longer project releases, they are beginning to fell like they are piling up again, with another couple of projects nearing completion as we speak, so we will see.
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