Poetry is experiencing one of its best moments, at least in terms of its popularity. Therefore, this may be the opportunity you were looking for to publish your collection of poems and finally make yourself known. And at MI bestseller we want to make printing and publishing your book of poems easier and cheaper than ever.
There is something about poetry that makes us turn to it almost instinctively when our feelings are most intense. Surely it is because poetry allows us to express what we feel without even understanding it ourselves. It is possible that you have amassed a considerable amount of verses and are thinking about how to publish your poems in a book and give them an outlet. Or maybe you share your texts on networks and you have realized that you can get a profit by publishing a collection of poems on paper or digitally. It may also be that you simply want to have your ideas, memories and feelings in a nice book that will last a lifetime instead of in a word document.
Whatever the case, in this article we want to give you seven keys to making a collection of poems and publishing your poems.
These are our 7 tips for making a collection of poems:
- Reread your poems
- Find a common thread
- Edit and order
- Choose the format
- Create your cover
- Get your first readers
- Sell your poetry collection online for free
1. Reread your poems
This step may make you a little embarrassed, but it is a key point to start publishing your collection of poems and, who knows, maybe also to reconcile with yourself.
We’re talking about rereading all the poems you’ve written. Yeah. It’s time to open all those word documents, the notes on your phone, the scribbled notebooks and all the places where you have left verses, ideas or simply words to transfer everything to the same document.
First, because it is good to be organized. This way you will have all your creative production in one place. This will be of great help when you have to start sifting, editing, or searching for ideas. Second, because this way you prevent all those great ideas from being lost.
This process can be very interesting for you and to connect you with everything you have experienced, or it can be a horror of self-criticism and shame of others. Whatever the case, don’t beat yourself up and don’t miss this opportunity to make notes of changes you’d like to make, poems you’d like to merge, etc. The perspective that reading everything you have written will give you is very important to start sifting.
2. Find a common thread
Now that you have all your poems and ideas in one place, it’s time to find those that can be grouped together. To make a book of poems that tells a story, the ideal is to find those texts that share the same theme or, at least, a group of themes that are related to each other. These themes will be the common thread of your collection of poems or will give it coherence.
This does not mean that you can only select those poems that deal with a topic, but try to ensure that the poems have some relationship with each other. For example: your topic can also be a period of your life, a person, a place, an experience or an idea explored from different perspectives. Although each of the poems focuses on an idea (solitude, love, illusion, loss…) they can all be grouped under the same motif.
This sign of unity and coherence will give body to your book and will help the reader to read your work and understand it better.
3. Edit and organize
We can say that now we come to the least fun part of the entire process. It’s time to take the scissors and cut. If we talk about the length of your book, in poetry we do not refer to pages but to verses. For a short book of poems, in a small format, we recommend that the maximum length be 200 to 300 verses. If you prefer to make a somewhat longer collection of poems, it will be between 500 verses.
That’s why it’s time to remove all the chaff. Plus, it sure has been a long time since you wrote some of your story writers for hire. Maybe you’ve changed your mind or you’ve come up with a figure that fits better. Reread what you have written, review the vocabulary and the form. Ask yourself if you have achieved the objective of your poem, if your intention is clear.
If you prefer to have your poems edited by a professional, you can always send us a message here to request a correction and editing quote.
Once edited, the order in which you are going to present it also matters, as if it were a music album.
4. Choose the format
You’ve already done the hardest thing! Now let’s get to the fun part: imagine your book already printed and on paper. At MI bestseller you can print your book in hardcover and softcover, in various sizes and with different papers.
For poetry books, we recommend opting for softcover books. These are the most economical and comfortable. As for the size, it depends on the number of poems you want to include. If you have decided to make a small collection of poems, it is best to choose a small format. This way the book will also look thicker and more compact.
If, on the other hand, you are thinking of printing all of your work or a considerable number of pages, the larger the book, the more comfortable it will be to manipulate, open and close, and the more in line it will be with the presence of your work.
In summary: we recommend the smallest formats for short collections of poems (110×180, 148×210 or 135×215) and, for longer collections of poems, 500 verses or more, you can use the medium format (155×235). You have all our formats and printing costs in our price calculator.
As for paper, we are classics and prefer cream paper or white offset paper. Semi-gloss white paper is the thickest and we recommend it for books with photographs, images or graphics. If you are thinking of making a collection of poems with illustrations, you can consider using this type of paper and a square format, for example. Feel free to explore: your project, your decisions.
5. And the cover?
Making the cover of a book of poems is easier than you think. In fact, they are the covers that allow the most creativity and minimalism. So if you have no idea how to make a cover, you’ve chosen the right genre!
You can create your cover in two ways:
- Once you have chosen what your book will be like and have uploaded your manuscript to our platform, we will provide you with the exact measurements of your cover. With these measurements you can create your cover in the image editor you like the most: Canvas, Photoshop, Paint, you choose.
- If the first option seems like hell to you, we have a solution. In the same cover pass you can open the online cover editor. You will see that we have several templates and images in stock. But you can also upload your own images, choose the color you want, delete and hide elements, etc. If you create your cover with our cover editor, it will be created with the exact measurements, without you having to configure anything.
To help you out, we have also created this page with some examples of formats and covers for you. You can also download the templates for each format.
And if you want a little inspiration, here are some examples of poetry collections published on MI bestseller:
6. First readers
You now have your book ready, congratulations! You are just one step away from launching it into the world. Before you formally publish ghost writers rap and get to work promoting your book, we recommend printing at least one test copy. We say “at least” because it’s also a good idea to order a couple of copies (from 3 you get discounts for each copy) and send it to people whose judgment you trust. First, because they will surely be very excited to have the first draft of your book in their hands. Second, because an extra pair of eyes never hurts. It has happened to all of us that we have reread a text a thousand times on the computer and when printing it we have seen an extra space that is annoying, a comma that is not where it should be, an accent that we have forgotten or a letter that we have eaten.
These small errors greatly spoil all the work you have done and it would be a shame if you placed an order for 20, 30 or 50 copies for your presentation and they all contained that tiny error that, like a botfly, does not allow you to enjoy all the effort that has been made. you have made.
Therefore, printing a couple of test copies has a dual purpose: first, it is useful to see what your book really looks like, if the font is readable, if the order of the pages is correct, etc. second, because then other people will be able to help you correct your book and give you advice on how to improve it.
7. Sell your poetry collection online!
Come on, we’re here! You’ve done the most complicated part of the poetry book publishing process: you’ve selected, edited, and arranged your poems. You have created a manuscript and cover for your collection of poems. So, even if it wasn’t your intention from the beginning, why not publish your poems? At MI bestseller the process is so simple that you just have to select the sale price and click a button. In 24 hours your book will be available in our online store so that anyone can buy it. We take care of printing it and sending it to the end customer in approximately less than a week. We will update your sales results so you can see how your book is selling and we will pay you your royalties monthly. You have all the information here.
