It now appears that I won’t have my copies of the print edition of my first book, Separation Anxiety, until early August.

The process was already going to take longer because the University Book Store’s Espresso Book Machine (EBM) has been down for a while (meaning that they’ve had to send all their EBM print jobs to Powell’s in Portland), so, even though the books were supposed to be done by the end of June, I figured it would be after the 4th of July holiday. Not really a huge deal, as the e-book version would be available in the meantime.

As fate would have it, a rush order for a bunch of copies of another poetry collection threw everything off schedule. Then, for some reason, my PDFs could no longer be opened, so I had to generate and upload new ones. This was also not really a huge deal, as I’d made a few very small formatting adjustments to the longer poems. Also, I still had a few things I hadn’t done yet; the additional delay would give me time to work on them.

A couple of days ago, I went in to pay the set-up fee for getting my book added to EspressNet. What that does is to enable my book to be purchased and printed at any book store that has an EBM. While it doesn’t quite equate to worldwide availability, there are EBMs in the US, Canada, Puerto Rico, Japan, China, the Philippines, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Ukraine, the Netherlands, and South Africa. Since this is a print-on-demand system, that means no additional inventory to produce, store, or ship.

Anyway, that’s when I learned that the current ETA for the copies I ordered is now somewhere between the end of this month and the first part of August. Again, not ideal, but the delay gives me more time to work on those things I hadn’t done yet.

One of those things is creating a media kit. I’ve still got a ways to go on that score—but that got me thinking about creating some kind of promotional postcard piece. I had done one of those two years ago for a local author when I designed the cover of her second book; why not do one for my own book? So, I set about putting something together.

I decided to use the fine folks at MOO to create the postcards. Their stuff can be a bit spendy, but they’ve got a 25% discount in place right now, so I thought I’d see what I could do.

One of the great things about MOO is that they allow you to have more than one design/image on the cards that you make. At first, I was going to have a slightly reformatted version of the cover on one side, then have the other side include excerpts from ten of the poems in the book. Unfortunately, the side of the card on which different images could be produced was the glossy side; having the side with all the text on it be glossy didn’t seem quite right. Then it occurred to me that—DUH!—this would be a great opportunity to reproduce some of the color Polaroids that I had to convert to black-and-white for the book IN COLOR.

I spent this last Wednesday working on the cards—selecting the images and the poetic excerpt, setting up and refining the formatting, and getting everything just the way I wanted. A few hours later, I had uploaded the PDF files, settled upon a quantity, and placed my order.

Although the MOO web site had indicated a turnaround time of seven (7) business days, my cards had been printed and shipped by the following day—and I received them this morning!

The cards still have that just-printed smell, so I’m letting them air out a bit. (I actually don’t mind the smell, but I have some chemical sensitivities, so it would give me a headache if I didn’t allow for some off-gassing.) But they look good, and will work well—both as a promotional piece, and as a bonus for those folks who buy copies directly from me after I’ve run out of the Polaroids I plan to produce for the copies I make available for purchase directly from me.

There are ten (10) versions of the postcard; here they are:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This has all been a slightly bumpy process, but the ease with which I was able to get these postcards made shows that not every part of the process has to be difficult. Plus, what I learn from working on this book can only help me when I get to the next one.

(19 July 2014)