My print book is live.

This mockup came with the cover design. The actual book is much thinner and I didn’t like the description on the back so I ditched it.

I’ve had books in electronic format for almost ten years now. I did everything—designed the covers and formatted the interiors, however clumsily—and I found it was pretty easy and inexpensive. But I knew the current collection of poems would have a better chance of success in print, and I knew of at least one person who expressed interest in my previous book of poetry but doesn’t read ebooks. I was originally going to print that one (Flight of Unknown Birds: Poems about the wildness and the weirdness within), but I got flummoxed by the higher level of difficulty of designing and formatting for print.

Then I had written enough new poems for a whole book. I decided to keep moving forward and put the new collection into print instead.

The process has been ridiculously long. I hit setbacks and set it aside for a while, tried again, gave up altogether. Months went by and one day I noticed it had been nearly a year since I had done anything for this project. I thought about whether it was worth picking up again, and why. I decided that I didn’t care about anything except giving this collection of poems to certain people for whom it would mean a lot, most notably my children. So I made a deal with my Shadow, the saboteur, that if I let myself publish this book, I would invest nothing in promoting it. I would order some copies to give away, then forget about it.

Part of the deal was that it would be available to purchase if someone wanted to. I’m just not going to ask them to buy it. As it happens, certain aspects of the format and cover are not conducive to store sales, for example, the spine is too narrow for the title to be printed on it. It will not be on the shelves of your favorite brick-and-mortar bookshop. However they should be able to order it for you, if you ask them to. A real book, that you can hold in your hands and flip the pages.

Amazon is notably slow in listing books that they didn’t publish. It’s not there as of today. But Waterstones has it in their catalog now, I suppose because the publisher that I went with, BookVault, is British. (American sales are to be printed in the US. But if you buy from Waterstones, where will it be printed? I have no idea.)

So there it is. My real book is available. I’m not asking you to buy it. But you can if you want to.