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Ask HN: Advice on self-publishing book of haikus?

8 points by agambrahma ↗ HN
(I thought my first submission would be more relevant to the stuff I like to read about, but still …)

I did a “write a haiku-a-day” challenge for myself (5-7-5 style) a few years ago, kept going for a year, then forgot about it. Stumbled across this again, sifted through them and got rid of most but feel like it would be worth publishing the rest _somehow_.

I would like some sort of physical artifact too, so AFAICT my options seem to be Lulu.com or KDP Print, if I want to self-publish, and … thought there just _might_ be someone here who’s done something similar, so … yeah, looking for any and all advice on this.

Much thanks!

4 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 23.1 ms ] thread
Adamantcheese
I've used Createspace (now KDP Print). Essentially what it boils down to is deciding a cover size, formatting your book internals to fit that cover size, with the appropriate margins (the inside margin where the fold is needs to be larger), spitting out a print-ready PDF, then generating a cover, which consists of the front cover, spine, and back cover. Because your spine size depends on your internal page count, it's best to figure out the internals first. KDP has templates that make it easier to make a cover if you want to do it yourself. Once that's all done, you take your print ready internals and cover, go to KDP or whatever publisher of choice you want to use, and follow the steps. An ISBN will be generated for you (and automatically placed on your cover art), or you can provide your own.

It's basically that easy, and the rest is a bunch of toying around. If you've got everything written in a non-book program, you can format everything with a combination of margin options and page size and VERY liberal use of page breaks. I don't recommend it though. Something like InDesign might be better, but it will have some learning curve. The same goes for your cover, MSPaint could technically work, but something like Photoshop/Illustrator will work better.

Hope that helps, even though it's not very specific. Every step has a lot of sub-steps to take care of and learn about, so take it easy and do it one bit at a time. Focus on book layout first, because if you have a specific style in mind for how your haikus should be laid out on the page, it's going to all happen there, and your page size choice may restrict you.

agambrahma
Thanks a lot, this is a great guide to go by!
dusted
There is also the amazon digital publishing service, which lets you publish for kindle and publish free print-on-demand paperback.