Self-Publish Your Paperback Poetry Book

1. Introduction: Writing poetry is good for the soul and those who read it rarely stop at just one poem. If you're a poet, chances are good that you have a collection of poems that you've been thinking about sharing with the world. In this course, I'm gonna teach you the step-by-step process for self-publishing your first book of poetry so that you can share your words with the world. Our focus is going to be publishing on Amazon's kVp self-publishing platform to create a physical book. But we're also going to touch on some other printing options and poetry e-books. First we're going to look at creating the collection that goes into the book. How many points should you include? What should the theme be? What order should the palms be in? We'll discuss some best practices and things you might want to consider when making these decisions. Next, we'll look at designing the actual book. We'll consider some examples of poetry books to see what kind of choices were made for the font, the placement of the poems, the artwork, and the illustrations. This will inform the plan that we make for designing the book, and it will help you collect the proper materials before we start the design process. After that, I'll share some different software and design tool options for designing your book and book cover. Once we have those files figured out, I'll share some advice for creating metadata for your book, uploading it to distribution sites and for sale online, and also some tips on Marketing. My name is Rebecca. I am your instructor for this course. I'm also a book designer and a writer. I've published 12 books with my own. And I'm very excited to share our best advice and self-publishing knowledge with you. If this sounds good, and let's dive into the course and start publishing your very first poetry book. 2. Compile Your Collection: Before you can get started designing and preparing your poems for publication, you need to organize your manuscript. In this lesson, we're going to look at the steps you need to take in order to create a cohesive poetry collection. The first thing you'll want to consider is how many poems will be included in your collection. This can vary widely. Some people write short bones, other people regularly long ones. So there is some difference there. Short collections of poetry which are usually 30 poems or less, are called chatbox. You can certainly publish those through Amazon kVp. But if you aren't going to be using the Amazon TDP platform, which is the platform that we're mainly focusing on in this course, it's important to keep in mind that the smallest page count that they can print is 24 pages. Average full-length poetry books are usually between 70 to 100 poems. But again, it depends on whether these are little four-line tiny poems or multi-page longer poems. Odds are pretty good that if you are taking this course, you already have several poems written that you want to publish in a collection. You should consider what kind of story or message you want to share through those poems that you've chosen for the collection. What is the thread that ties them all together? Do they need to be read in order like a story? Or can they be red randomly at anytime? Your poems can be narratively linked, but they don't have to be. The connecting thread between your palms can simply be a time period. Maybe these are all poems that you wrote during a specific time in your life. Or it could be a specific, it seem like coming of age, relationships, travel, or something more specific and personal. Your book's theme is important because this is why people are going to be drawn towards your work. The theme should be something that other people can relate to or that would be interesting to observe as a spectator. For example, I have the life experience of moving to a foreign country and I would find that are relatable subject that I'd like to read poems about. But I'm also really interested in mythology. Poetry collections with that name also catch my eye. By making your book seems something relatable or interesting. You'll be able to find and targeted audience who might like to read it, which is very important when it comes to marketing later on. Now when you pick up a poetry book in a shop, how do you decide whether you want to read it or not? Some people will flip through and find a random page to see what they find. But others will turn to the very first poem. This is because the first poem often sets the tone for the rest of the collection. If you're poetry collection has a narrative than the first poem might be kind of obvious. It's the start of the story. It should introduce the story much in the same way as the first chapter of a novel. But if your collection is a little more free form, I'd recommend picking either a poem that feels very representative of the vibe of your collection or go with a poem that you consider particularly strong. It's also helpful to do this because if you are selling your book on Amazon or another platform, they usually let customers preview the first few pages. This might be the first time anyone's ever read your poetry. You want to start off strong to give them a reason to keep reading. If you are trying to need a certain poem count to fill out your book, it can be very tempting to add in some filler poems to bulk up the book a little bit. However, I would recommend that you be a bit ruthless with your critique and very honest with yourself. Poems can be malleable. So if you're doubting about the quality of one and whether it deserves to be in the collection. Consider how you could rework it or add to it to make it more substantial and relevant to your theme. No matter what kind of book you're writing, it is important that you try and keep your reader engaged in your words. We want to readers to be hooked on what we're saying and to continue turning the pages instead of tuning out low-quality poem can't do that. Keeping the same quality of tone throat collection will help keep the reader engaged. Of course, occasionally reader will need a break or a breather between poems, especially those that are very emotionally raw. But that's a positive reason for breaking the reading flow. There's still engaged with your writing even if they've paused reading. What we really want to avoid is that disengagement that comes from something out of line with the rest of your writing. So be critical when you are reviewing your collection choices. Deciding on the order of poems can be very tricky. As I mentioned, he might be working with a narrative collection, in which case the Pullman's do have an obvious order that most poetry books are a little less structured. One good way to decide on the order of your poems, if you're a very visual person, is to print them out on paper. And then to line up the poems on the floor or on a table, then you can move them around very easily and take a look at the overarching structure of your collection. But if you're more digitally inclined, you might want to try using writing software that easily allows you to rearrange components. Two examples of this are Scribner and Atticus. Those are two tools I like to use myself. I use them for writing novels mostly, but recently I've also used them for organizing poetry collections. These two softwares use different interfaces to achieve the same thing. They allow you to put your chapters or poems in different documents or cards, and then you can drag and drop them around on the screen. I will be giving you a little demonstration of Atticus later on for formatting. I'm a big fan of both tools. Whoever's Gryffindor is much more complex to learn, whereas Atticus is more simplified. Advocates can also generate the interior PDF of your poetry book, which can make the publishing process really fast. However, this doesn't offer as much customization as other design tools that we'll talk about in an upcoming lesson. You can find links to both of these different pieces of software in the resources document for this class. With all that being said, you should be able to pull together your poetry collection so that it is ready for formatting. In the next lesson, we'll talk about the process of creating a concept for your books design. 3. Design Your Concept: In this lesson, we're going to look at the different elements that go into the design aspects of your poetry book. Many poetry books do not only contain words, they also include artwork, illustrations, or photos to accompany the poems. This is definitely not necessary. You don't have to do this. You can just stick to strict words. But if you are artistic or have a particular vision for your collection, then you can definitely add images to compliment your narrative. One important thing to keep in mind when you are self publishing a book is that it is more expensive to have color printing on your book interior. Unlike the printers that publishing houses work with, you can't opt to have just a couple of pages in color while the restaurant black and white, it's all or nothing with self-publishing, for short books, this might be something worth considering. But in general, the cost of color printing is going to eat up a lot of your profit margin. I wouldn't recommend it unless you have a very particular sales strategy in mind for that book. But even with grayscale or black and white images, there is no limit to the ways that you can get creative. Drawings and line art, photographs, collages, and more can all look really great inside your book. If you aren't very artistic yourself, but still want to include complimentary images in your book. You can hire an artist or illustrator to create pieces for you. Alternately, you could also license artwork that has already been created. Sometimes you can find work that really speaks to your poems, themes, or narrative. A good place to look for pre-packaged artwork that you can license is Creative Market. I've personally licensed to work from dozens of artists there. And by purchasing a commercial license, you can use those designs for all kinds of projects in addition to your book. Once you have your manuscript ready and possibly any images that you want to include, then you want to start to plan how you're going to lay out the different assets on the page. A good place to get inspiration for this is from other poetry books. You might want to swing by your local bookstore or library to browse through titles and see what they're doing with their layouts. You can also use Amazon look inside feature to see what other folks are doing in terms of page design. And we're gonna do that together in just a few minutes. Generally, you're going to see poems either left aligned or centered on the page. I've created two examples here for you to see what that looks like. You're also going to have to decide whether you want each poem to have its own page and therefore a lot of whitespace around it. Or if you'd rather have the post-print and consecutively so they run into each other. The second option will reduce the number of pages overall, which will make for a shorter book, which could save on printing costs if you find your book is looking a little bit long, but it's also just a different style for readings. So it's really up to you what your vision is. You also want to consider what kind of header and footer you want for each page. You put the page numbers at the top or the bottom. And the two examples here you'll see the one on the left, the page number is at the top, top-left corner. And in the second example on the right, the page number is at the bottom in the center, just in different styles to consider. You can also put the title and author name in the headers. It's another style or you can skip this. This is a bit of a more traditional book formatting choice, but some poetry books do continue to use this style. Consider whether your poems have individual titles or not. If they do, what kind of formatting are you going to use to distinguish them from the body text? If not, then how you position the poems to indicate the start of a new one, you could use spacing or images to do this. And finally, consider what kind of font you want to use for the book. In general, a standard serif or sans-serif font is the easiest to read and a good choice for the body texts. So that's like an Arial or Times New Roman. However, if you want to use a fancier font, which is called a display font, I'd recommend using a very light hand with this. Poem titles could be a good place to leave them. And maybe you could do more artistic design work where the words of the medium, some WordArt and be creative as you'd like, of course. But I do strongly encourage that you use a simple and readable font for the majority of the poem text. Front matter is the handful of pages at the front of your book that comes before the actual text itself. You'll want to design a few front matter pages to make your book look professional and to include some key information. Here are some examples of things that you will often find in the front matter of books. So first of all is the title page, which a little bit obvious. This page includes the book title and subtitle. If there is one, the author name and the publisher name and sometimes a little decoration nor an illustration. The copyright page is the one that has all the technical information about your book. As a bare minimum, it should include your name, the year of publication, and the copyright symbol, along with the phrase, All rights reserved. That is a very simple, basic copyright page that is effective if you don't want to get too complicated with it. And I've included that on the screen here you can see the copyright symbol on the copyright page. You can also include information such as contact information, the name of your book designer or illustrator. If you're working with somebody else, you can put the ISBN in there or a longer statement of usage rights. Another thing to put in your front matter is a table of contents. Not all fiction books actually include a table of contents. It's more of a nonfiction thing, but poetry books can go either way. So it really comes down to personal preference. If you like the aesthetic of a table of contents or just looking to bulk up your book with a few extra pages. This could be a thing you could add in. You can also add a dedication. You may want to dedicate your book to someone in particular. This is typically formatted as a short note centered in the page, sometimes in italics, sometimes not. You could also add a forward depending on the kind of project you may want to include a forward that is written by you or by somebody else. If it's somebody else, it's usually someone note in your field or related to the subject matter. The forward serves as an introduction to the collection explaining the concept at large or any background information that the reader might want to know before diving into the palms. I would say that most poetry collections do not include this, but there's certainly are lots of examples that do. These are just examples of what you might find in the front matter of a poetry book. Of course, you can be very creative and come up with your own ideas that suit your project. The back matter is very similar to the front matter of your book. There are lots of different kinds of pages that you can include interchangeably at the front or back. But some examples of what you might find in the back of a poetry book include an author bio. This is typically just a few sentences about you, maybe a short paragraph, a photo, and also information on how to get in contact with you. So that could include social media handles or a website, but maybe even an e-mail address. You could also include a list of other publications. If you have other books out, you can list them here. Also, if you produce other books in the future, you can go back and edit your book file and re-upload it to show the other books you have out in the future. Some authors include a grayscale version of the book cover in the back matter. In addition to, rather than just the list of the words, you can certainly just do the list, but I find that a small grayscale version of the cover is actually really a nice approach because it's very visual and kind of makes you think like maybe I'm interested in that based on what the designers. You can also include a call to action in the back matter. This could be an invitation to join your mailing list for future updates or to follow you on social media. You can even go so far as to build a sales funnel offer here. So maybe for example, you offer poetry workshops. And if the reader uses a special coupon or URL that's in the back of the book, they can get a discount. This complaint to a bigger marketing strategy or business strategy if you would like. You could also include a preview of other work. Sometimes this is a passage from another book or even just a single page advertisement. This is a good place to include quotes or reviews of other work too. If you have them. You can also include your acknowledgements here. This could be in the front of the book as well, but it's more commonly in the back. If you have people who want to thank for supporting you are contributing to your book project. You can include a section here for that. Again, you can devise your own back matter sections depending on your projects and your needs, you can also decide to skip the back matter entirely. It's not exactly critical as the front matter. You could just have the last poll and be the last page. But I would recommend at the very least just do an author bio just so that you can kind of get some credit for the hardware keep down and making this book. Now let's hop over to a screen share and I'm going to show you some examples of using Amazon's look inside feature to do some research on book design and interiors. 4. Research: Book Interiors: In this lesson, we're going to take a look at some of the best selling poetry books on the Amazon store just to examine their interior design to get some inspiration. I've gone through here and pull it a few, but feel free to go on Amazon yourself and just type in poetry book or search for the particular genre or style we're looking for and just find some books. Amazon offers the look inside feature, which will show you a couple of pages that can give you some really great inspiration. The first book I clicked on to take a look at here is called what we carried by Amanda Gorman. This is a very popular book. This one does not offer the look inside feature, but it does have four images here, which is why I wanted to show you. This is the cover right here. Sorry, this is the cover right here, which is very lovely. There's a couple of very unique page design shown here. So this one is almost like a text message bubble style page. So that's kind of interesting. You can definitely design this in Canva if you are going to be designing your book there. This one also has a poem arranged in an interesting way like this. So when you put your palm on the page, it doesn't have to be just text lined up or centered. It can be made into an interesting shape. This page here is actually all black with white text and we're gonna see another book that features this a lot. In fact, you'll see that here in this book, which is milk and honey, bye Rubik hour. This is an extremely well-known and bestselling books, so you'll likely have heard of it before. And this does have the look inside feature, which means we can take a little look and see what the designers like. The cover is all black as you can see here, we scroll down, this is the title page. It actually shows it again here. So this is more of a proper title page. We have the text on the top, the name of the book, the author name, and down below is the publishing information. This is the copyright page, and you'll see that lots of pages in this book are all black. This is something that is important to know as a self publisher. I said in a previous lesson that it is more expensive to produce a book that is full of color pages, which is absolutely true. Now in black and white, you can produce pages that are the inverse like this. However, there have been some issues with the bleed through up the color on the other side. If you meant to have an all white page on the opposite page of an all-black page. You might find that it's a little bit darker because some of that all black ink is going to bleed through. This is just something that I've heard reported in publishing groups. I haven't personally published any all-black page books, but just something to be aware of the way that you would want to combat that is to have two all-black pages back-to-back, so that either side of the page is the same printing style. As you can see, this is a fairly standard copyright page. You can find this in any book you find on your bookshelf. I recommend if you've never written a copyright page before, literally just grab one off your shelf and take a look and see what components are there. It's usually going to be the statement appear, then information about your publisher, you're ISBN contact information and sometimes a statement about what you can do with the book or how you can get copies for schools and things like that. Next, there is a dedication page again on the black background. This is the sort of introductory statement. And then we have a table of contents, which this is one way of dividing up your poetry book rather than naming all the poems. You divide it into sections and label those sections in the contents page. Then it ties into the first page of the poem. You can see that not all pages are included on the previews on Amazon, but this is the first page layout. You can see that her page leaves whoever designed them is very simple. We have the name of the author at the top of the poem in the middle and the page number at the bottom. Now this book is called The sun will rise and so will lead by Genesis. Celia, I'm pronouncing that correctly. This is actually a self-published book. You can tell that because if you scroll down to the publishing details here, so it's independently published, which is what shows up if you use Amazon's Katie platform, which is kind of what we're talking about. So this is a great example of what you can produce that way. We take a look inside, we see the beautiful cover. And then the title page here has a little drawing which I was a little bit of artwork is acute touch on the title page. Again, a very simple copyright statement page. Nothing too fancy here. You can do spacers if you have the want to bump the pages to be left or right to add an extra page to make that happen, you could do an all white page. You can have an illustration. And I think the illustrations here are very lovely. And then we have, this is more of a dedication or this is actually more of a forward kind of statement before it goes into the actual poetry, which again follows the pretty standard outline of title at the top, title or author name, and then the page number at the bottom. This is our last example on Amazon. It's a poetry book called violet bend backwards over the grass, which is by Lana Del Rey, who was actually a singer. And it's clearly a very popular book as well. This one is the hardcover one we're going to be looking at. So you can actually produce a hardcover book using kVp. Now, you can self-publish a hardcover that wasn't an option until fairly recently. So that may be something you want to consider when you're producing your book. Again, here we have the very lovely cover page with just an image on it as a spacer. And the reason I wanted to highlight this particular book, this is sort of a title page we'd ever into the poetry here is that this is an example of a poetry book that is full of multimedia rather than a white background. We have actually like a paper image behind this one. And then there are full color photographs in here. I'm not going to go through too much in there, just a couple of pages since you're gonna copyrighted materials. But this is an example of how you could use a full color book if you wanted to print your pages with color, you can include a few code images, but you can also go all out and make the whole page color as well. You'll see that the topography is also pretty non-standard here. It's not all linear, it's done in a typewriter font, which is also a little bit off center and a little bit misaligned, which as an interesting sort of textual detail to it. As I mentioned, you can add any kind of image or illustration photograph to your books. Just keep in mind that extra price that comes with the color content. If those are just some examples of the kind of poetry books you might want to look at for inspiration. There are so many different options and things you can do with your poetry layouts to really create a unique book. So definitely hop on Amazon or any other site that offers a look inside feature and see what kind of designs inspire you for your own book. 5. Gather Your Materials: With all your planning being done, it's time to gather up your materials for your design work. This is a very quick lesson talking about file formats to make your job as easy as possible. If you are including artwork, ensure that your files are in workable formats like JPEGs or PNGs. Pngs in particular are very useful because you can make transparent backgrounds. If you are going to be creating an e-book version of your poetry book in addition to the print version. And you'll want to keep in mind file sizes. Ebooks can sometimes include a digital delivery fee if the file size is really big and that usually comes from a very large image as being embedded in it. That delivery fee comes out of your profits. So keeping your image file sizes conservative is important if you're going to be publishing and dual format. Having a thoroughly edited manuscript before you start designing is key. I tell this to all of my book design clients. But inevitably there are a few who underestimate how many typos and errors slip through. Trust me, it is so much easier to fix problems before you start designing and type setting your book rather than after. If you can afford to hire a proofreader and editor, I would recommend doing so. However, that might feel like overkill for a very small project or maybe it's outside of your budget. I highly recommend the software intro writing aid as it's able to do some pretty high-level reviewing of your text and flags grammatical issues that even human editors can miss. It's much more thorough than just using the spellcheck or grammar check on your word processor. I use it for all of my personal books and I'd even run client projects through it. Occasionally, you will find that tool linked in the course resource PDF as well. Next, you're going to want to prepare all your links and social handles for easy reference. Decide whether you want to use your personal social media accounts or if you want to create some specifically for your poetry. We mainly use this information to link in the author bio at the back of your book, as we discussed in the last lesson. If you have a website or want to use a custom URL for a newsletter sign-up or anything like that. Have those domains sorted ahead of time to save time when you're designing. As a self-publishing poet, your publisher is you, but you may want to create an entity to make your book look a little more professional. You can come up with a publisher name and a logo if you want. These can be used on your books back cover, on the copyright page and on the title page. In order to create a publishing house for this purpose, you don't actually have to register a business. You can if you want, but it's okay if this exists in name only. However you may want to consider registering it if you have plants on growing and expanding your publishing business over time, not necessary, but just something to think about. Another reason you're going to want to have picked the publisher name is if you are going to provide your own ISBN for your book, an ISBN which stands for International Standard Book Number. It's a unique number that lives above the bar code on your book. It is used to identify your book title across all marketplaces. Ebooks do not have to have ISBN, but physical books do. Different formats will also require their individual ISBN. For example, if you have a paperback or hardcover and an audio book, those will all need three unique ISBN. If you're self-publishing through Amazon, they can provide you with a free amazon ISBN, I believe was called an ASIS. This is a good option if you're not getting your book printed anywhere else. You can't use the Amazon ISBN on other platforms, it's just for Amazon. But if you are having your book printed elsewhere, for example, with Ingram Spark, which is the platform typically use to get your book available for catalog quarters from physical bookstores. You will want to have your own ISBN. The rules for purchasing an ISBN depends on the country that you are based in. There's usually one company only or what agency in each country that sells them. In the USA, the only agency that sells ISBN is Boker, that's spelled B0 WK, ER. And Canada, where I'm based, they are provided for free from Library and Archives Canada. You just have to register as a publisher, which is again free. It really varies in the country. You can find out what rules apply to your country simply by doing a Google search for ISBN and then your country name. And you should be left to the right source for acquiring one. If it's complicated or expensive and you don't want to do that, you can simply choose to only publish through Amazon if you are going to go the route of getting your own ISBN, I do recommend giving yourself some time because there can't be processing times involved. You don't want it to hold back your publishing deadlines. Typically it's not very long, it's only maybe a couple of days if they're very backed up. But that's just something to be aware of. Finally, the last thing you want to have prepared ahead of time before we start designing is to have your friend and n matter tax prepared. This will help ensure that you don't forget any important details that you want to include in either of those sections. If you are including an author photo for your bio, make sure that it's converted to grayscale and appropriately sized for printing. If you have sections like a forward or acknowledgments, have those passages written and edited ahead of time. I find that these often get overlooked until the last minute, but they should be prepared with just as much care as the rest of your manuscript. You don't want typos when you're thinking people with all of these different aspects of the book prepared, we can head into looking at some design tools. I'm going to show you some walk-throughs of designing different book pages in a few different pieces of software. So you can see some options that make paperback book formatting pretty easy. 6. Design Your Book Interior: In this lesson, we're going to talk about designing the interior of your book. Our goal is to create a PDF book interior, which is the format that self-publishing platforms will accept. No matter what design tool you use for creating your book interior, you're going to have to figure out what margins you want to send. Margins are the white area around the book pages. They make sure that your text doesn't run off the page or gets sucked into the gutter, which is the name for the space between the two pages. At the spine. Typically you're going to have the same margins on three sides of your page, the top, bottom and outside edge. The edge that faces the spine usually has a bit of a wider margin to ensure that your content isn't distorted by being too close to the spine. So in this image here, I've put a, a red border around the outside margins. That's pretty much going to be the same size and all those sides. And then down along the center where the purple is, that's the spine. If you look at this as two pages in the book, you'll see that three sides have the red border and one has the purple border. You'll also note that the page on the left-hand side, it will have the spine on the right-hand side and vice versa on the other. That means that every other page in your book may have slightly different alignments. It may be over or to one side or the other in order to be properly aligned when it's opened for reading. The margin sizes can vary a little bit, but there are minimum sizes that you want to adhere to. For the examples I'm gonna do and the walkthroughs I'm gonna show you, we're going to create a five by eight inch book as our example, with about 200 pages. For that size, Amazon estimates that you need your sides to be a minimum of 0.25 inches all around the inside. Now that's just a minimum. If you follow that, it will keep your texting me and cut off. But it may be a little too close to the edge. So we're gonna do some measuring to pick this out we actually want. And then the side and the gutter should be a half an inch. Now having different measurements for your gutter measurement and the outside margins is fairly standard for book design practice. That's just kind of how books are traditionally designed. However, I've found that for self-publishing, it can actually be perfectly fine to simplify this process and just use the same measurement all around. It doesn't make much of a visual difference. In most cases, I would recommend just using the same gutter measurement in this example, it's half an inch on all four sides. This will also make it simpler depending on the tool you're designing with. So we'll look more at that shortly. If you do have a hard time visualizing the margins that you want for your book. You can actually just grab a copy of any book off the shelf and a ruler. Try to find a book that is the same size as the one that you want to produce and just measure the margins with that ruler in terms of common mistakes, more often than not, I see margins that are too narrow rather than too wide, especially for poetry books. You don't really want your words cleaning to the edge of the page unless there is some sort of artistic reason for that. So don't skimp on your margins. The first design tool that I'm going to be demonstrating is Canada. Canada is not necessarily intended for book design, but I find that it can be a good free option for certain projects. It's the tool that I use to design all of my journals and low content books. And it can also work for poetry. The reason that I don't like it for text heavy books is that I find the tools for setting the margins to be a little less than ideal. There's also no way to automate the page numbers, so you will have to make sure that they are correct manually. Canada also doesn't allow texts to flow. So what that means is if you make a text-box on one page and then you fill it up and you want the text to continue on the next page. There's no feature to let it automatically do that. You'd have to then copy and paste the text on the next page. So this makes it difficult if you have to go in and adjust the text afterwards, it can be very frustrating. These are mainly just convenience features. So it doesn't actually restrict you from doing that. It's just that it takes a little bit more effort to get the result you want, as opposed to using a tool like Adobe InDesign, which we'll talk about briefly after. Also note that Canada can create your paperback book, but it can't create e-books as an ePub format, which is what all the distributors want. If you want to create an e-book version as well, you'd have to use another tool such as Microsoft Word Pages or Google Docs, which can all export ePub files. Another note about Canva is that the documents cannot be longer than 100 pages. If your book is longer than that, you'll simply have to make two files and just merge them into a single PDF. When you're done, Let's switch over to screen-sharing and I will show you some tips on the basics of setting up your canvas book interior. Set up your book interior in Canto, you first need to know what sizes you're working with. And as I mentioned, the example we're gonna be doing isn't eating if by five-inch book. But I wanted to show you this page on the kVp help section Help Topics. So this is the set trim size, bleed and margins page which is going to be linked in the course handout. If you scroll down through here to trim size for the kVp.amazon.com section, yielding up to other section is the Japanese site. This is for most countries, this lists all the common trim sizes that they do. That trim size is basically just the size of your book. Five by eight is the smallest size they offer here, however, you can also do custom sizes. They do allow you to just can put your own measurements within certain restrictions. So for most cases, this is going to be standard for you, five by eight inch or 5.5 by 8.5. A six by nine tend to be the most popular sizes. Now one important thing to know about designing book interiors is about bleed or no bleed. Bleed is basically, as Amazon illustrates here, a little bit of extra space around your pages. If you're images or anything on the page is going to go over to the edge of the page. If all of your text is going to be like this image here and has a white border around it. You want to know bleed book, that's no problem. But if there's any image, even just one in the whole book that goes all the way to the edge or you're doing an all-black page, for example, you want to calculate the book size with bleed. That means that the cutter for the book when it's being printed, the machine that cuts the pages will cut it right to the right edge instead of leaving a white gap or something from the printing. So Amazon will tell you what size you need right here based on width and without bleed, because I'm going to click on the American version. And these are page size with hopefully and page size with bleeds, you can see five by eight inches if you're doing without bleed. So nothing goes to the edge of the page, which is pretty standard, just the five by eight inches, the size we need to design in Canva, if you're gonna do it with bleed, you have to add a one to five or 0.125 inches to the width and then 0.25 to the height of the book. The demonstration we're gonna do is without bleed. So I'm gonna hop over into Canva and see what that looks like. The file I'm showing you here is actually a poetry book template that I sell on my Etsy store. So I'm just going to use this as an example. It's already set up for you see, this is a five by eight inch book and I'll show you there's not actually that many pages. There's just 16 pages in total in this template. You'll see here these have a lot of the common pages we looked at in the examples of other books. So title page, copyright page, dedication, a blank pages of spacer, table of contents, and a blank page, three pages for the forward. And you can actually see this here. It's a good example of the different way you lay out text. This is a flow, so that word ends here and the next word is right up here. This is one of those features that Canvas it doesn't Automate, so you have to do manually. This is why doing a full novel in Canvas can be really frustrating. But doing a poetry book is a little bit different, so it's easier to do. We also have the title of the section right up here at the top and the number at the bottom, which is again a pretty commonly at least find many of the books down here. There are three versions of the page layout in this template. This is the plumb center aligned and this is it left justified and left justified with an image. So you can do any kind of layout you want, of course. Then we have the backup battery here, which in this example has an About the Author and acknowledgments page and other works by the author. Let's look at them more closely. These purple lines are set for the margins of the page. So as I mentioned, I was going to set a 0.5 inch margin on all the pages in this document in Canada said margins. All you have to do is make sure that they're activated. First, go into File and click on Show Rulers and Show Guides. That's going to make this ruler at the top and side show up. And it's going to make these guides appear. To add a guide, all you have to do is click in the ruler and drag, and it will let you place one at different measurements. So you can see right here, this one is set at 0.5 inches on the top. I've also set 1.5 inch from either side and one at the bottom, the same measurement. Now these four grids are going to show up on all my pages, which is really helpful. But it also means that in Canada it's very difficult to set different margins per page. Which is why using that little hack of just making all the measurements of the same, including the gutter space is helpful here. Now you may notice that there is an extra line at the top. This was just a line that I set myself. It's about one inch down and it actually indicates where my poems start. I'm just scrolling to the forward and I wanted the actual text itself to start at the one-inch line and the forward is at the top of the margin. This was just a decision I made based on pulling off a book off my bookshelf and measuring the margins. And I saw that I liked the look when there was a full inch of space above the main text. But the four on the edge are the most important ones to make sure that your text isn't cut-off at all if it's extremely off centers, sometimes Amazon even flagged the file when you upload it telling you that there's texts in the gutters of the margins? The way that I laid out the poems on these pages is I put the title at the top entitle. I went with a sort of all low cap style, which is a little bit popular but just stylistic. And then I centered the title of the poem here. Not all poems have titles, of course, if you want to include them, I did them a little bit. Larger font. I actually, in terms of font sizes for poetry books, the typical font size you want for any book is going to be around ten to 12. I think 12 actually looks a little bit big. But depending on your audience and it makes it a little bit easier to read if your font is larger. So generally I will go with a size ten for the body font. However, I will note that depending on the font you choose, the size is may vary. Some fonts are actually just bigger than others. So you do want to kind of look at that. Compare the fonts if you're choosing between a few of them, it made the top font here a size eight, and the page number is also a size eight. In terms of style for the poem title here it's just a bigger font size. In this one, the font is italic. He could do underlying or bold. You can use a different font entirely. And as you can see in this example, I just plunked an image down just to show that you could very easily add images, especially line art, black and white line art to your poems to enhance them. And Canada has a very large library of perfectly free graphics that you can use for this purpose. This is how I set up the About the Author page. So you would just drag and drop your own photo here. Canada actually allows you to grayscale images. All you'd want to do is put your image if it's already a color image, click on Edit and then head over to the. Filters, and then there's two filters at the bottom that are black and white and gray scale looks a little bit better. Street is a little bit too dark. I find that it prints out a little bit weird, but grayscale makes it a little bit more clear. This is an example of a really easy way to lay out your author bios. So just a very simple three sentences about you and then a website and social media handle. It doesn't have to be very complicated, but especially for first-time poetry books, a little bit of information is probably just enough. I added an acknowledgment section here at the back, and then I also added a few other works by the author. If you don't have other works because this is your first book, you can just delete this page or you can actually add in if you're included anthologies or magazines, if your work published anywhere else. You can also note that here. Now two things to note about working in Canva. Number one is that you are capped at a 100 pages. I mentioned that earlier. If you do want to have a collection that has more than a 100 pages and use Canva, just make a second document and put the rest of the pages and that one and then merge the PDFs when you're done. Another thing to note is that when you are publishing, you need to have an even number of pages. So if you reach the end of your project and you're at 15 pages, for example, that's not divided by two. You wanted to add one blank white page to the end, just to bump that up to an even number. When you're done working in Canada, all you do is download the file. I like to pick a PDF print so it's a high-quality and then download the document, then you should be ready to upload it to Amazon or wherever else you're publishing. Vellum and advocates are two pieces of software that do similar things. The format books for print and e-book velum is only for Mac computers, whereas psychosis for either Mac or PC. Now these tools don't allow you to do as much customization as Canada or other more complex designs software. You can't go in and move things around on the page, for example. However, I personally use advocates for a lot of projects and it can produce a very nice-looking book interior with most importantly, all the margins and the size incorrect for publishing on Amazon. This is a really good option if you're not interested so much in the book design part of self-publishing or creative layouts, it does a lot of the work for you. Let's hop over onto your Screenshare and I will show you briefly how to use advocates for this purpose. This is what a document setup in Atticus looks like. Also, I know that this sound differences a little bit different when I'm doing a screen recording versus a voiceover slides. So I apologize, I've tried to adjust it so it's not too bad for you. Now, advocates is a fairly new piece of software and they are rolling it lots of new features all the time. So if you get it in the future, it may not look identical to what you see here, but it will be very similar. Now this is just a project I've been working on. So on the left-hand side you have a menu is all the different pages and chapters. You can drag and drop them around. You can add and remove them. There's front matter, which has all the things we've already talked about. You can also click on these dots to add in all these examples of other front matter. And there's also examples Back matter here which is listed at the bottom. Though I haven't added any to this document yet. So it's very good for creating e-books especially, but this will also generate a physical interior book for a print book. You can do all your writing in here and formatting as well. Once you have your book content all written and ready to go, you click over on the formatting tab, and this will allow you to pick the way that your book looks. I'll just skip ahead to this is where a chapter is. Right now I'm going to click and see there's all the different ways you can preview it. So this is how it would look on an iPad as a, as an e-book. But they also have print right here. This is how it would look as print and they have all these templates built-in or little themes. You can also create a custom one, but you can choose whether it's got more of a flowery, cutesy look. There's a sort of a space stage one here. One was little hearts. You can choose all the different settings in terms of what shows up whether you want the chapter number or alignment, you can adjust that as well. Basically this is just a lot of settings, but you can't exactly change it the same way you could on Canvas. I can't go and grab this and move it around. Or I can't press Enter here and move the text around at all. Now there are some print settings here. You can choose the font that you use for your paperback version. You can also set the header and footer, which looks a little bit like what we've talked about so far. You can do top and bottom or the top. And you can see all these different trim sizes for a book. So five by eight, so we've been working with, but they have all these other options as well. When you're done all your formatting and designing inadequate. So you can just export the PDF, which is what he used for the print or export the ePub for the e-book. From this, you can see that this is a very easy way to create a book, but it doesn't offer the same kind of customization that a software that allows you to edit page by page will, depending on what kind of book you're creating, this may be exactly what you need. I believe Atticus is a onetime purchase of software. It's not a subscription, which I think is really great. Adobe InDesign is considered the standard software for book design. And software is very complex and powerful, but it comes with a bit of an expensive monthly subscription. How complex this tool is. I'm not gonna go through a whole tutorial here, but I do have another course coming out very soon, providing a full tutorial on designing books in InDesign. It may already be available depending on when you're taking this course, so you can look for that. So with all that being said about different design tools, you should be able to find one that suits your comfort level and design skills. If you find this part of the self-publishing process to be very daunting. You can definitely hire a book format or who will help you out? I do book designed for clients myself. And since poetry books are on the smaller side, they shouldn't be overly expensive to have formatted. The cost of book design typically goes up with the complexity and the length of the project, which is worth keeping in mind. In the next lesson, we're going to move on to looking at poetry book covers. So I'll see you there. 7. Design Your Book Cover: Your poetry books cover can be as important to the conversation of your narrative as the poems themselves. Book covers have to walk a very fine line between functioning as a marketing tool to attract readers, and being artistically representative of the spirit of the content. Whether you're going to design your own cover or hire someone to do it for you. In this lesson, we're going to go over some cover basics to get you started. You have a lot of creative freedom when it comes to your book cover, but there are some expectations when it comes to what kind of cover a poetry book might have. So I'm going to flip the screen and let's look at some covers together. Amazon is another great place to find inspiration for covers. I also recommend looking through Pinterest and other bookstores, even in-person to find more cover inspiration. But we can find some really common styles and themes happening here that might help you guide with your own design work. When I take a little scroll down through this and again, I just searched for poetry books. So these are just the top results for the phrase poetry book. Very simple. There are some definite stylistic trends that we see happening here. You'll note that three of the books on this page are by the same authors, so that does influence it a little bit. But these books in particular have been very influential for the genre. And you'll see that a lot of the covers are styled in the same way as that. The trend that we're seeing was, Is right here is a lot of blank space uncovers. Usually there'll be a solid background. There's not a lot of pattern backgrounds. Typically in a neutral, we're not seeing vibrant colors as much. And then a illustration or drawing over top, sometimes line art or sometimes a very simple, almost abstract style. In terms of fonts, we're also seeing serif fonts in pretty much all of them are Serif fonts. And generally seeing the title of the book is large, whereas the name of the author is very small. Scrolling down to look at some other ones. The trend really does continue very text forward covers, but there are some exceptions right here. We have a more feminine artistic style. Now there are reasons you would and wouldn't want to follow trends like this. On the one hand, these are popular for a reason. They attract attention from audiences. They could be helpful with your marketing because people will look at these and recognize based on things they already know that this is a poetry book. When it comes to selling books, the thing you don't want to do is confuse or mislead your viewers. That is the best way to get them to not buy from you. So to this end, having a book cover that fits within a trend is actually a good thing. Clearly it's working for all of these books because they're all in the front page of Amazon when you start with poetry books. Additionally, a lot of the books that you see here that are different are actually traditionally published and not self-published. And I noticed this because a lot of these books are already familiar with, but many of them you can tell from the price. It's not often that self-published books can be this low and still be profitable unless they're very small books. Another thing worth noting is that a lot of these books, you wouldn't mistake them for novels. I don't think he would look at this and assume it was a novel. I think this comes from the general minimalist trend that happens on poetry books. Even if the subject is very busy like this when we looked at earlier, there isn't a very specific subject, those drawing our eye or convincing us that there's a main character or something like that. This end you'll find that mostly the subject matter is an inanimate object, a landscape, or an illustration that isn't a face. Now if you wanted to niche down a little bit and look at specific types of poetry book. You can do that. Let's try poetry books. When you click on this here, it gives me a bunch of suggestions of popular ones. So let's try for kids. Now here we see that the styles are quite different. The poetry books for kids are very colorful. These are actually a lot more styled like a picture book or a novel. I think generally this is because most poems for kids aren't as abstract or philosophical as poems for adults. Generally there is actually a subject matter or a character, or a creature or something that you're following in the poem. That makes a little bit easier to create a cover with a subject matter or a focus. For example, when I look at this book, which I don't know, I would assume that these are poems it as a collection of small poems, days like this. I would assume these are poems about a family. Having a picture of a family on the cover makes sense. Days like this implies, it's about adventures and going on day trips. This is not a subject matter that I would probably pick up as an adult reading poetry. But for a kid, this is going to introduce them to the medium of poetry through the format of a story which is more accessible for them. So again, you're going to see that the covers, it vary based on your genre in general. Now I switched over to poetry books that have mental health. Here we see very specific trends. All of these books look like they could've been decided by the same person. And if we scroll down, that theme really continues, It is a lot of dark backgrounds, black covers in general, lot of texts forward, lots of blank space and maybe a couple of line drawings. We see Butterfly, Butterfly heart, person, in-person persons. So the themes are very similar. And like I said, following a theme, following a trend is not necessarily a bad thing. If I was looking for poems about mental health and I saw these books, I will go, yup, that's what I was looking for. I found what I was looking for and then I could click through them and find if the description matches up with what I want to read. Now if I go over two poetry books from men, interestingly, the trend that pops up here, and I will quantify this to say, there's a lot of books in here that actually aren't poetry that do get mixed in. But in general, the covers I'm seeing here are much more text forward. There's not so much illustration, but big bold letters. The whole style of minimalist illustrations really seems to restricted to other genres of poetry. A good place to start searching on Amazon is think about what the audience for your book is, whether it's a certain gender or demographic. And try searching for that first. Then look at subject matter to see if there's any trends in there. Then ideally you can combine those different trends to create something that is unique, representative of your book, but still appeals to the audience that you want to sell to. From a technical standpoint, you want to have here cover in a PDF format just like the interior. The size of your cover will vary based on a number of factors. Paperback and hardcover books have very different cover requirements. You'll be uploading a single graphic that includes the front spine and back cover all in one image. The width of the spine will vary depending on how many pages are inside your book. That's why it's a good idea to have the interior formatted first. Once you have that page count and know what size and format you want your book to be. You can go over to Amazon's cover calculator and get all the specifications you need. I'll show you how to do this in just a moment. It's important to note that while many print on-demand companies can work with the same files, Ingram Spark stands out as one that needs a very specific cover. They give you a template that you need to edit and design in Adobe InDesign. And you don't have access to this platform but wanted to publish on England spark. You may want to hire a cover designer to help you out. They may be able to reformat it cover that you made for kVp to work on Ingram Spark, but it will depend on the files. So keep this in mind if your overall publishing strategy includes Ingram spark, you might want to start from that point. Anchor spark also requires you to put your isbn into your template because when you generate it, you will need that number ahead of time. So with that being said, our focus for this course is getting your book published on Amazon. I'm gonna show you how to get a cover setup right with the right specifications in Canva, which is generally the fastest and easiest way to make one. What we're looking at here is Amazon's print cover calculator and templates. Now this was introduced pretty recently, which is really exciting because it used to be very annoying to have to calculate the right measurements and numbers for your cover size. Now, all you have to do is use this page which again is linked in the course handout. All we're going to do is fill out this information here and generate the coverage dimensions are binding type first of all is hardcover or paperback. These are very different size templates, so I'll show you the difference between them. But let's start with a paperback interior type. We're gonna do black and white. That's gonna be most books. Paper type, cream or white. This only matters because there's a very slight difference in the weight of these papers. So if you have a larger book, it would actually change the width of the spine. For most cases I usually look white paper, but cream is also very nice. Page turn direction is left to right measurement. I'm going to do it in inches and then interior trim size, we're gonna go with the 8.5 verse by five by eight inch book. This is why you need to have your interior done first before you do the cover, you need to actually know it entered here. So let's just say we have a 200 page book. I just clicked calculate dimensions and this is what it gives me now this is very handy. Amazon clearly learned that this was a difficult for people. So they've actually match it over a clearly what you're looking for, what you're actually going to put into Canva to create the document is the full cover width here. Number one, your Canva document to make the cover is going to be 10.7 inches by 8.25 inches. For this specification I put in here. When we do that, we're gonna be working with a space that looks like this. The front cover is going to be on this side. The spine is in the middle and the back cover is on this side. Now if we were doing a hardcover book, it would look a little bit different. Now, hardcover is limited in terms of the sizes they actually do. They don't do the five by eight, but they do 5.5 by 8.5. We could calculate that. There's much bigger margins on the hardcover version. And that's because if you think about the way a hardcover book is constructed, the image on the cover actually wraps around the top and is glued on in sign of the cardboard. So you need to have extra image and extra cover graphic that there's no weird whitespaces during that folding process. But we're going to go along with doing a paperback, since that is a little bit more common. At this point, what you would do is jot down those numbers, the 10.788.25. And it also going to download the template right here. And I'll show you what I'm gonna do that in a moment. So it's just going to download a zip folder which I will insert. Now let's hop over to Canva and we're gonna go to create a design custom size. I'm going to pick inches and I'll just type in those numbers that we got 10.7 by 0.25. Let's get rid of that. So this is the size of our cover for our paperback book, but as you can see, there's no guidelines which isn't very helpful. So all I'm going to do to get that isn't going to take that template that we just downloaded from Amazon. And I'm gonna drag it and drop it into this image. Here it is. This is the template we just downloaded. I'm going to put it up in the top corner. It kind of locks in there and make it the full size because we calculated correctly, it's going to fill up the full image. We're not going to keep this here forever. We're just going to use it to set our guidelines. So again, file and you're going to make sure that Show Rulers and Show Guides is turned on. I'm going to zoom in just a little bit. And we're just going to mark out these pink lines because this is going to show us the margins of our cover. So we'll just click here and drag down for somebody. The black lines, which is the trim lines, that's where the book will actually end. The pink lines are the bleed. So you want to make sure that there's nothing important put in the space where the pink lines hit that. Especially it's important here for the spine. You don't want your texts for the spine touching the pink lines. I will just drag and drop separate guidelines for the pink lines. There you go. So now every one of these guidelines has a guideline and Canada, now the dashed line along the center is where the book of will actually fold. So that is where you want to mark that as well. Now before I delete this layer here to get rid of this image, we can start designing the cover. This is where the barcode is going to go on kVp, you cannot change the location of the barcode unless you provide your own. I find that can be a little bit fiddly, so I usually just leave it in the Amazon. Put the barcode there. You're designing on income Spark using their template, you can't actually relocate the barcode on that template specifically. Now if it's helpful to you, you could always add a square or rectangle. I do that just by handling our button. It gives you a rectangle. I'm going to just make it make it pink, and then I'll just make it opaque as well. I'm sorry, I'll make it transparent. Then just fit it over that yellow box with a barcode goes just so I can know where it's going to be placed. Lock it so it doesn't get moved. Okay, and now that that's done, I'm just going to click on this image in the background and hit Delete. There we go. There is a perfectly set up guideline for creating your cover in Canva. At this point, you can go and add your images, add your texts, really play around with it to ensure that your spine looks the right way. I made this mistake the first time I ever made a book is that I put the spine facing the wrong way. You got to remember that if this book is lying flat on a table, you should be able to read the spine when it's facing up. So that could help you make sure that your text is facing the right way. In terms of getting images and things to put on your cover, you can definitely get started with the things that Canva offers you. They have a very large collection of photographs that you can use even as a free subscriber. If they're marked as free than Canada indicates that you are free to use them for commercial purposes such as publishing a book. You could use any of these pictures for your cover. However, you can also bring in your own, your own illustrations or artwork. You can go through the elements tab on Canva and use their graphics or illustrations as long as they're available to you. I have a Pro account, so some of these images will show the pro logo, so I could use those, but they're not available if you only have free account. Luckily, you can actually filter for that. All you do is when you're in a search, click on this and then just click down here on free. And it'll only show you images that are available if you have a free membership. What's really just that simple to get started making your cover in Canva when you're done with your design and ready to export it, do remove this rectangle so it doesn't show up on your final proof. Just like your interior when you're done, All you do is click Download, go to PDF, print, and download your cover. It'll be ready to upload to Amazon. You can also use the same cover file to upload to Barnes and Noble press and also drafted Digital have accepted the same cover from me. For those platforms, you don't need to design separate interiors and covers. Ingram Spark is the only one who specifically has a different cover template that you need to use, but your interior can be the same frame. Now let's wrap up this lesson and move on to the next one. 8. Creating Your Metadata: You should now have or at least know how to create your book interior and cover files, you're almost ready to publish. But before you can upload your book to a distribution website, you're going to need your metadata. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about distributor options, but generally they all want the same metadata. We're gonna go over those elements first. Metadata is simply means the information about your book. This is the information that websites used to index and catalog your book. And it's how they know when to show your book to a customer. First, we're going to look at the metadata that you're probably very familiar with, which is your title, subtitle, and author name. Your title is very much up to you. There are no particular rules around this. But as always, you can get inspiration from other books. However, most poetry books take a word or a phrase from a meaningful poem inside the collection as the title. As for the subtitle, there are two schools of thought here. If your book has an actual subtitle, you can use that. But you could also use this space to provide potential readers with a clue about what the collection is about. For example, you could use the subtitle, a coming of age poetry collection or poems inspired by traveled through America. That way people know what your poems are about, especially if the title is a little abstract. Another option if you have a subtitle for the book, but wanted to include this kind of descriptive tag as well, is you can put both in the subtitle section and put the poems inspired by travels around America In part in brackets at the end. As for your author name, you can either use your real name or a pen name. I would highly recommend that you check Amazon and others online stores to see if there are any writers using that name already, especially if they're writing in your genre, consider that you could use variations of your name, using initials or middle names if you find a conflict. Your book description is important because it is your longest foreign piece of media. Crafting the perfect book description is a bit of an art form. There are actually people who make this their entire job. But you can definitely craft your first blurb yourself and don't be afraid to change it over time. If you think of a better way to position your book, start off with the description of the content of your book. You can describe what sort of story you're telling or the theme of the collection. Something that you might want to consider when you're writing your blurb is who is the ideal person that you were trying to sell this book too? How can you speak specifically to them? What kind of problems as your book solve or how does it help people? Is there a message that it conveys or as a time in life that it'll help someone get through. You can also think about what makes your book unique or what makes it stand out from among other poetry books. If there's a differentiator there, that could be a good marketing tool. The book description is also a good place to include keywords as long as they are organically worked into the text. Keywords and categories are how sites like Amazon catalog their books correctly. Categories are more like the shelf in a bookstore. You get to pick two categories for kVp. So think hard about where your book most belongs. The poetry book category is a great first choice. But if your collection focuses on another subject, you can choose that as the second. For example, if you approach your book is about horses than horses or horseback riding could be a good secondary category. Keywords, on the other hand, are labels that help readers find subjects that interest them. Amazon gives you seven keywords slots to fill out. You can also include keywords in your title and description as mentioned. Just ensure that if you do that they're really organically placed, not like list of keywords at the bottom. You don't want it to look cluttered or spammy. You want to be through thoughtful about what kind of keywords you're using. Think about the words or short phrases that people would type into a search engine to find your book. You wouldn't want to use poems or poetry book as a keyword because those are way too broad and you will never have a chance of showing up on the first page for those keywords. Keywords like poems for teens going through a heartbreak. Or Canadian young adult poetry collection might have more interest. And if you do use a phrase like poems for teens going through heartbreak, you are also tapping into word combinations within that phrase. So palms for teams or teams going through heartbreak could also lead customers to your book. There are different pain tools out there and they can help you identify highly searched keywords published. A rocket is the one that I use personally, it shows you how many people are searching for keywords on average each month. You can also play around with the autofill feature on Amazon search box for free. This will suggest terms that people have been searching for recently related to the prompt that you put in. Now when you get to the last page of uploading a book to kVp, it asks you a few key questions related to pricing and distribution. Paperbacks on Amazon or setup with a 6040 royalty share. That means if you sell a book for $20, for example, you will get 12 and Amazon gets eight. However, it's very important to note that the cost of printing your book comes out of your share. That means if you have a really long book with colored pages, your royalty could be very small at the end of the day. But if you have a smaller size book with black and white pages, more of the world he could end up in your pocket. This isn't a reason to skimp and make a very tiny book. Instead, you want to be aware of the ratio of value to price. If you pay $20 and received a book that was very thin and small, you might not necessarily feel like it was worth it. This can lead to negative reviews and your product, it's important to consider the balance between your cost of production, the desired profit, and what a customer would reasonably pay for that book. One good way to figure out a pricing ratios to look at what's similar books are selling for personally. And this is just the way that I run my business. I like to make sure that my books have around a $5 profit margin for paperbacks. That's not an industry rule or anything. This is just my personal objective for paperback and hardback sales. With all of that metadata in mind, you should be ready to get your book on Amazon, kVp, and start publishing your first poetry book. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about distributing your book through some different channels. 9. Planning Your Distribution: Now that you've got all the components of your poetry book ready for the world, it's time to start sharing it. In this lesson, we're going to briefly go over some different distributor options and my advice for leveraging them. Since we're focusing on physical books in this course, let's go over some different ways that you can distribute your books via print on demand services. We've covered using Amazon kVp so far. Ktb is the leader in the print on demand book industry for three main reasons. They're low printing costs through huge marketplace access and they're fast turnaround times. It's extremely difficult for other marketplaces or printers to compete with Amazon. But other options do exist. They might be of interest to you if you want to reach and even wider audience, or if you decide against using Amazon in general for whatever reason. Ingram Spark, as we've already discussed, is the print on demand book printer that can put your books on Amazon, but also into catalogs that physical bookstores can order from like Walmart or Target, as well as small independent bookstores. There is a fee per book to use this surface, and you will have to do your own marketing to drum up that bookstore interest. It's unlikely that you'll get much passive interest here. I've personally ordered paper books of the same book from anger, Spark, and kVp, and they were almost identical. The only difference was that I found the colors on the ADP version, we're slightly more vibrant. I really don't think it's something that you can notice unless you were looking for it, the quality is very comparable. Barnes and Noble will also offer paperback books for you. You can upload the same files that you use on Amazon to this platform. They use Ingram Spark for the back-end of printing, but you don't need to pay to upload your books to Barnes and Noble. Your books will only appear on this platform. They don't share it with other companies. And this site mostly appeals to an American audience. Lulu and Blurb are two very similar companies that print books on-demand. They also can put your books on Amazon and other marketplaces for you, but you will receive lower royalty is going through them then going directly to Amazon, since there's an extra company in the next that needs to be paid, they don't really have their own marketplaces. Blurb does have one, but it's not the kind of place where you're going to make a lot of sales. And I've actually been very happy with the quality of paperbacks and hardcovers that I forgotten from blurb personally drafted digital is a book distributor online who has a print option that has relatively new. I've not tried it myself, but that might be another option that you want to consider. Now if you have created an e-book version of your poetry collection, you might want to distribute that widely as well. So a few notes on e-book distribution. You want to make sure that that book is in ePub format. You can use all the same metadata from your paperback book, or you can mix it up and use different keywords. Amazon kVp offers a program called Kindle Unlimited. This is a subscription program for readers where they get access to the whole KU library for a monthly fee. I am a subscriber myself. If you put your book into that program, you're not able to sell that e-book anywhere else online. You cancel your pivot back other places, but the restriction is just on the e-book format. Ku participation runs on 90 day terms and you are paid per page read generally this means that you won't make as much per unit as you would selling the book upfront. But for certain genres, this program can be very profitable. Now I don't actually think poetry is one that I would encourage you to enter into KU. But if you aren't interested in distributing your e-book more widely, you could consider just trying it out since the exclusivity wouldn't be an issue. Now, other platforms besides kVp where you can sell your e-book include cocoa, Apple, Barnes and Noble, google playbooks, script or smash words. There's also many, many other smaller ones. Distributors like drafted digital can actually get your book into those smaller catalogs without having to open a 1000 more accounts. And they can actually make your books available in libraries. I use drafted digital for my e-books and they let you pick which online stores you want them to upload for you and which ones you'd rather do manually. So I actually like to manage almost all of the big platforms myself, Amazon, cobalt, Barnes and Noble, Google Play. I do those all manually, but I really liked the drafted digital will put it in smaller ones like Vivo, Julio and some international marketplaces I wouldn't use otherwise. They do script for me and they also do Apple books. Books has a very frustrating interface for uploading books too. So that's a great twist if you want to get your books there. And I actually do sell quite a lot of books on Apple's through drafted digital. And it finally, in terms of pricing, e-books are usually price lower than print books. And most self-published books sell between $0.99 and for 99, for a lot of authors that feels really low or like you're undervaluing your book. And I totally understand that this is just the reality of the market and what customers are expecting for self-published books and even traditionally published books now, which are often more expensive, but usually have large marketing team behind them. For a lot of authors, getting their books into physical bookstores is a very big dream. You can definitely achieve this as a self-published author. However, it does require some legwork to get done, and the profit margins may be extremely small compared to selling direct online. If you want to have your books and local stores, you're going to need to acquire some copies of your book. If you are self-publishing with Amazon, you can order off the copies from the GDP dashboard. Note that these can take a little while to ship as Amazon doesn't prioritize them the same way as customer orders. You'll also have to pay shipping because they don't qualify for prime. The important thing about author copies versus the books that you buy right from the storefront on Amazon, is that the author copies do not include the page at the very back of the book the Amazon puts in that says printed by Amazon with a barcode, you definitely don't want to include that when you're selling through a local small business. Amazon is the biggest threat to small bookstores. Therefore, don't be surprised if they are not thrilled to carry books that are printed through them. Sometimes the Amazon ISBN could give that away as well. However, some bookstores do realize that many independent authors would not be able to publish at all if not for Amazon services. So don't let that hold you back, but do be aware of this reality before you approach stores, you can also get your books printed through one of the other services I mentioned, *****, your slide. Now bookstores will either pay you upfront or they will take your book on consignment. Generally, small businesses prefer consignment for items they aren't sure will sell well, if nobody buys the book, then you can go pick it up from them when it doesn't sell and you can try again elsewhere. The amount of the bookstores are going to pay you for your book does vary. Some will pay you 60% of the cover price. But most general stores, meaning stores that don't only sell books, will just go for the industry standard wholesale rate, which is usually 50%. So for consignment, you might actually get a higher commission. So perhaps they only take 30% for consignment books, but there is a risk of the books won't sell at all and then you just don't get paid at all. If you are going to put your books on consignment somewhere, I would really recommend putting together a document that lists your name and your contact info along with the number of books, the title, and the agreed terms than you and the store can both have a copy of that and you can make sure to keep track of your inventory that way. Since we are talking about local businesses, you may consider using a local printer for your book. I'm a very big fan of supporting local small business owner myself, but this can be a big challenge for small-scale publishers as the cost of printing locally is often very high per unit, the price will go down as you order a bigger quantities. But then you are tasked with selling the books, which can be challenging. As an example, just to illustrate this for you, I was helping a client get quotes for printing locally. If they went through Amazon, the books that they wanted to make, what's going to cost $3 to print. The local printer spoke to a quoted about $11 for 50 books that could go down as low as eight or $9 with a higher quantity like several 100 or 1000 books. Given that the client wanted to sell her book for about $15, the printing would have eaten up most of the profit. If they then wanted to be carried at local stores, it would have to self or at least double that, maybe even starting at $22 just to break even without even making a profit. Now, different printing businesses may have different rates and fee structures. If you are very passionate about doing this, you can still contact them for project quotes. Just keep in mind that it's challenging for small publishers to get reasonably priced books in smaller quantities. Now with all that being said about book distribution, Let's move on to the last lesson about some marketing ideas. 10. Marketing Your Book: At this point in the course, you've either got your book designed and published or you have a good idea of how you're going to make that happen. Now let's look at some ideas of how you can market your poetry book. The first marketing idea is to run an author platform. That means a social media account, maybe a website and profiles on relevant book sites like Amazon authors and GoodReads. Running an author platform is a great way to show up in spaces where your readers are already hanging out. Books to Graham and book talk are to niches within their respective social platforms where leaders and authors can connect. These platforms also have thriving poetry niches and you can find more readers there too. You can certainly use your own personal accounts to run your author platform. But you might find that creating separate social accounts for your author persona or business is helpful in targeting the right audiences. Another platform is a good idea if you are someone who really likes creating content like posts and videos or articles, poetry really does lend itself towards social media as many people enjoy reading poetry in tweets or as artsy images on Instagram. Lots of poets find success from these methods, especially if your poems have a lot of shareability. Pinterest is another platform where you can share images of your work and link your book. You don't need to have any other social media necessarily to use Pinterest. I find that people are often searching this platform for meaningful quotes, which is how poetry can spread pretty quickly through the search results. This is a good free strategy if you like designing graphics with your words. Canva is a really easy tool to create Pinterest graphics. And you can organize boards to sort your different types of work. You can get your work out there by joining poetry specific communities, Facebook groups, or by entering contests. There are Facebook groups designs specifically for writers and poets, where people can post calls for submissions for projects. Just search for your genre and poetry on the platform and see what kind of groups show up. Magazines and journals also do calls for submissions for poems. Sometimes you pay to be included and other times they will pay you. The second is obviously nor desirable, of course, but contests are an example of a case where there may be an entry fee. Although these spaces online might feel few and far between, they are really great way to get your name out there because the audiences in those spaces already like reading poetry. It's a good idea to think about what kind of people would enjoy reading your work and then figure out where those people spend their time online. Another way to branch out is to diversify your product offerings. There's an old saying in the publishing world that the best thing to sell a book is a second book. As you build up your collection of poetry books, you'll start to find readers who want to explore all the things you have to offer. Don't feel discouraged if your first book has a small reception or if the hybridized down after a little while. Publishing is just one of those industries with compounding interest. You'll need to have perseverance if this is something you're very passionate about. However, you might also want to think about products that aren't books as well. While art prints, greeting cards, and merchandise can all be interesting ways to take your words and turn them into products. You can do this via an Etsy store using print on demand services like printf or print defy. Or by submitting your work to distribution web sites like Redbubble or societies six, I have another course on selling digital products on Etsy that you might want to consider exploring if this is something you're inclined to add to your portfolio of revenue streams. Finally, of course, you can use paid advertisements to promote your book. Ams is Amazon's marketing service. It is a way to promote your book within Amazon's own platform. Here you pay per-click. That means that every time someone clicks on your books ad, you are charged a small fee. This platform can take some trial and error to get right. But lots of authors find it very helpful in selling their books. Facebook, Pinterest and Google all have their own ad systems. These also have a learning curve, but authors are actively using them to promote their work. I would strongly recommend that you seek out specific training courses on these platforms before you start to sink a lot of money into them. As there are very specific strategies that can be used to help make your ads profitable. There are also many different email newsletters that recommend books to readers. These newsletters usually offer paid spots and you can apply for book bulb is very popular example. It's also extremely competitive. Other authors with large following sometimes also offer paid spots in their newsletters. There are some websites that offer reviews for your books in exchange for a fee. I'd be cautious about these sites as they can be really hit or miss, as to whether people actually read them for book recommendations. There's also a chance that the reviews may be biased since they are paid for. A free or more affordable option could be to use an arc service. This means advanced reader copy and you give out copies of your book, usually the e-book in exchange for reviews on the day of release. I've had success finding ARC readers through book sprout. But there are lots of other companies that do this such as book sirens. These sites usually have free options as well as paid memberships with extra features. With all that being said we have reached the end of the course, I really hope you learned some helpful info to help turn your collection of poems into a finished published book. As an assignment for this class, I would like to see you create a page layout for one of your poems. This could be just a sample from your book or a practice exercise. Canada is a really great choice for getting started quickly. You can use one of your own poems or find one in the public domain something that's old and free to use. Once you've got your layer designed, post a picture of it here for the other students in the class to see. And also, I'd love to see them if you enjoyed this class, please do consider leaving a review. I read all of them myself and I really appreciate them. I also have lots of other classes on publishing and creative businesses that you might enjoy. So do consider checking goes next. I wish you the very best of luck with your creative projects. Happy publishing, and I will see you next time.