Jilly Dybka from Poetryhut interviews Carol Peters
JD: Why did you want to publish like this?
CP: So many reasons:
1) I don't want my book to use any more of earth's resources than it needs to. Therefore, no paper, no ink, minimal warehousing, no physical transport, no physical store, no customer driving to a store, etc.
2) I don't believe in other people deciding when my book is ready to be read. Therefore, no contest, no judge, no editor, no publishing house.
3) The poems in Sixty Some are as finished as I know how to make them, but unless they've been published, I keep working on them. For example, I ran across a great couplet by Alexander Pope today and at first I thought, this would be a perfect epigraph for my great blue heron poem. Next I thought, too bad, that poem is in Sixty Some and "done." Although half the poems in Sixty Some appear in journals or anthologies, I still worked on them because journals have very limited distribution, hardly anyone has read the poems. Publishing this book means I've cleared these poems out of my way and can work on new poems.
4) I have no illusions about making money by writing and selling poetry books, and I want people to read my poems. Therefore, I make the book available for little to no cost. If readers want to read Sixty Some on a browser, they can read them for free. If readers want to read Sixty Some on a mobile device (Kindle, Sony E-Book, Blackberry, iPhone, etc.) they can buy the book specifically formatted for that device for $1, which is one penny more than Amazon's lowest price for a Kindle book. I don't believe in pennies, so . . .
5) I was curious to learn how to publish an e-book and an mp3 audiobook. Before I became a poet, I designed and built computer software and hardware for 25 years, so I knew I could figure it out, either on my own or with a little help from my friends. My friends were great. I decided I would claim victory when I could listen to my book in a browser and on my iPhone and read my book in a browser, on a Kindle, on my iPhone, and on ereaders installed on my MAC and my PC.
JD: Was it hard to publish like this?
CP: Yes, not because it's intrinsically hard but because when I began I knew nothing except how to read an ebook in a browser or on my Kindle. I didn't know the devices or the formats, and I was determined not to spend any money.
First, I aimed at Amazon's Kindle, which turned out to be a waste of time because Amazon's converter tells you your file can't be converted but doesn't tell you why. I switched to browsers and by writing a lot of HTML code, I succeeded at making a good webpage and then a website to publicize and publish the book.
Then I found Mobipocket Publisher, which is pretty simple to use and works and converted my book for the PC, Blackberry, phones that run Palm OS and Windows Mobile, and various ebook devices I'd never heard of and have never seen.
The next step is to convert the book to a format that will look good on an iPhone. I haven't found a free converter that works, and doing it by hand is a lot of work, so I've been avoiding it. The next step will be to create and package the audio version(s).
JD: It seems like, since you have sussed out how to make the e-books, that you might be able to provide that service for other small presses. Have you given any thought to that?
CP: From the start, I wanted to learn and then explain the epublishing process so that other poets and writers could epublish, too. I began documenting as I learned, but that broke down as my frustration grew. Likely I'll have to take a second manuscript through the process in order to write a tutorial. I will do this and publish the tutorial on the web.
JD: Poetry is. . .
CP:
JD: Writing poetry is. . .
CP: