The process of self-publication

My brother, Stephen John Svoboda, self-published his novel For Reasons of Youth one year ago, and it was after ordering a copy and seeing it come in the mail looking all real that I determined to self-publish myself through Authorhouse, the same company he had used. I forced myself to work on the collection in earnest at the end of 2008, when I took advantage of one of the company's frequent promotions to "lock in savings" -- at the time I hadn't really looked into alternatives, some of which in retrospect look as though they might have ended up with an equally real-looking book at a fraction of the cost.

Authorhouse provides some nice services that really do give you the sense of "being" published as opposed to just publishing yourself in the sense of going to Kinko's, printing your stuff up, and trying to get other people to read it. They schedule a conference call with the people who lay out your cover and galley, and they sound knowledgeable on the call. If anything, they set your expectations a little over high in that process, perhaps especially in the case of poetry...

When I got my first galley proof back, I discovered that rather than simply porting my lineation over from Word, the layout person had transformed over a hundred of my poems in ways that made no sense at all: for instance, about fifty of the poems in the middle of the poem (which, granted, have no punctuation or internal indications of lineation) had their titles and all text concatenated into slugs of text bearing no resemblance to the originals.

I spent several weeks stewing over the mess that had been made of my book, then hunkered down with a copy of the galley and my original, inserted line breaks and correction marks, sent back a two pound package of corrections, and found that whoever they have doing corrections to galleys is seemingly more attentive than whoever does the first cut. My second galley proof was "perfect," in the sense that it made every correction I had asked for, correctly. Any remaining errors or typoes are my own...