I Self-Published A Poetry Collection And It Was The Hardest Thing I Have Ever Done Emotionally

It’s hard to bare your soul once, try doing it 40+ times

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them — Charles Simic

Publish your poems, they said. It’ll be fun, they said. People will love your work, they said. What didn’t they tell me? How gut wrenching it would be.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an on-again/off-again relationship with the written word. I still have a copy of a story I wrote when I was in the 4th grade. It was FanFiction and quite bad, but I kept at it. I wrote for myself, penciling away in secret notebooks that never saw the light of day.

That was until a close friend said I should publish my writing, claiming it was too good to stay locked away. Maybe it was the boost to my ego, but I went for it. I created a pen name here on Medium and started pushing my work. I’ll be honest, my writing is not for everyone. I write mainly erotica, but along the way, I found a community, and within that community, a fellow writer inspired me to start publishing poetry.

Simply put, it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Writer’s Digest says poetry is therapeutic. But for me, it opened old wounds and brought forth tears. In a sense, I guess it was therapeutic but painful nonetheless.

Even though it was painful, I published my first ever collection of poems on Amazon recently. I did it all myself, including the design. It took hours of writing, research, and no shortage of frustration. Yet, along the way, I became a better writer and more connected with myself.

How did I do it without losing my sanity? Well, I tested different methods until I found what helped in bringing this passion project to life.

The tools that helped me

First off, my method may not work for you. If I’m honest, I didn’t write my poems. I dictated them. Every morning I take my dog for a walk. It’s 45 minutes, rain or shine. Normally, I listen to music or a podcast. It was during one of these walks when I felt a poem forming in my mind. I flipped over to Evernote and started dictating.

Dictating into Evernote is super simple and I’ve been using it for about two years. You open a new note, click the microphone and start speaking. A word of warning, make sure you speak clearly and prepare yourself for the recording to stop mid-sentence. It really is a pain to dictate a strong line and see it didn’t record.

In the 30 minutes that followed from that fateful moment of forming this poem in my mind, I dictated the first draft of what would become the poem Honey Bee. It felt raw and real. I felt as if I was Ginsberg performing Howl for an imaginary audience. I was hooked.

Soon, my daily dog walks turned into me dictating poem after poem into Evernote. Some days I could get two or three poems in those 45 minutes. Others, it was more like half a poem. The only issue was these were unedited thoughts in the form of poetry.

Insert Grammarly. While Grammarly isn’t normally used for poetry, it did help in finding misspellings from the dictation. It also allowed me to clean up the line breaks since in my haste, I forgot to insert them while I was dictating.

In terms of the poetic structure, I turned to ◦•●❄ Christina M. Ward ❄●•◦’s poetry checklist. Christina runs the publication ThePOM. She is an accomplished poet, and I turned to her checklist to help with my structure, imagery, and verb tense. It was a lifesaver, and I felt as if I had a poetry editor holding my hand all along the way. I can never thank her enough for putting that checklist out into the world. It allowed me to look at my poems with a critical eye and not get caught up in the emotions they stirred in me.

Self-publishing hell

Writing and publishing a few poems here on Medium soon became not enough. I started to dream of putting together a short chapbook. A chapbook is a small collection of poems that revolve around one unifying theme. I looked back through the poems I had edited and dictated, and saw one underlying current.

I liked to wax poetically about the darker parts of love. So, I grouped them in a word doc and enrolled in Kindle Direct Publishing. This is when my self-publishing nightmare began.

When you are the sole owner of every step in publishing a book, the stress of one misplaced comma can send you reeling. I poured over my document, uploaded and then poured over it again. I found the formatting was off in one version. I found a misspelling in another. I went back and changed multiple poems because I wasn’t happy with the line breaks.

Stressed doesn’t begin to describe the feeling that gripped my soul.

Then came the cover design. I chose to keep it simple and used a royalty-free image to keep me from losing my mind. I selected a haunting image to help the reader connect with the title. I wanted people to feel something before they even bought the book. Did it work? Yes. How long did it take me to select the photo? About eight days.

I can give you one piece of advice when it comes to cover design. Test your photo on a few devices. Make sure it looks good on a computer screen as well as a phone. Sometimes they don’t size well, and it’s back to the drawing board when that happens.

All in all, from that first moment of dictating Honey Bee into my phone, to pushing publish, took me about a month.

Final Thoughts

Some will say a month is too short to put out a quality poetry book. I will admit I used some older poems to help fill out my collection. I will also admit I took a page out of contemporary poetry books and had prose and single sentences in the book.

What I won’t admit or agree with, is a month is too short to write powerful poems.

I was inspired to write my poems. I know they resonated with people. The comments here on Medium support that. A good poem is something that causes the reader to react emotionally. It doesn’t matter if it takes two minutes or ten years. All that matters is the connection with the reader.

So the obvious question is what’s next? For me, it will remain daily writing here on Medium. I’m also beginning work on a longer book of poems. Will I self-publish again? Yes, because having done it once, I have a better idea on how to make the launch of my second volume more successful than the first.

A better question to ask is will you take the leap and finally publish the book or poem in your soul? I hope you do because it’s worth every soul-wrenching moment you will go through.

I speak from experience on that, trust me.

Get a copy of my poetry collection here.