Poŝtmarkoj el Esperantujo

For several weeks, I've been working on a secret project which I can finally reveal today: I've published a book! Today, you can order Poŝtmarkoj el Esperantujo, a book of my original haiku with associated artwork in the original Esperanto with English translation.

I checked with a couple of likely publishers to see if someone else wanted to publish it for me, but there's almost no money to be made publishing any kind of poetry -- let alone obscure Esperanto poetry by an unknown author. So I just published it myself.

It was fascinating to go through the process of laying out the book, playing with the typography, and ordering a proof. To actually get the book in my hands was a wonderful experience.

As a kid, I was always fascinated by postage stamps. In this project, I took some of my best photography and got to turn it stamps! For a long time, I dreamed of being a serious photographer. I learned, eventually, that I was never going to be more than an amateur, but it's amazing now what you can do with software -- way better than a dark room ever was.

I did the whole project using Free Software: the illustrations were created with GIMP and Inkscape and the book was laid out using Scribus. I used Createspace to publish the book because they seemed the one that was most focused on enabling people to build the pieces themselves -- the other services I looked at were more focused on having you submit your content in some kind of web-based wizard, that would magically mangle your content into a slick looking book. I wanted to get my hands dirty (in a pixel-stained-technopeasant sort of way).

Maybe in another year, I'll have enough haiku to publish another book. Or maybe I'll make some other kind of book next time. If you make the interior just black-and-white, it's amazing how cheap it is. With full color, I managed to keep the price per book to just under $10 (I make $0.14/copy!) And so if a million people buy my book, my royalties would make me a hundred-thousand-aire! (Before taxes, of course. :-)