The Best of the Barefoot Muse Anthology

I enjoyed playing with Createspace so much I bought the company…No, of course I didn’t, but I did buy in to the idea of using the POD service to produce a Best of the Barefoot Muse anthology in print.

You remember the Barefoot Muse, of course? The formal poetry e-zine I began in 2005 that ran for 11 issues before I finally realized something had to give? It had always been my intention to use the material to create a print anthology one day, but this intention crystallized as I worked through the CD production process. How hard could it be to do a book? The material already existed, and poets tend to jump at the chance to have their work anthologized, even if all they get out of it is a contributor copy.

So, you find me well into the production process. Indeed, I have well over half of the book in place. Createspace provides handy templates to use in Word to make the formatting easier, and there are several excellent free tools for converting said Word file into a pdf when it’s quite ready. I’m a little nervous about doing the cover, although the lovely Erin McGee Ferrell who provided the artwork for issue 3 has agreed to provide one of her images. And I’ve learned lots of things I never knew about Word. (I’m SUCH a geek!)

Seriously though, I now understand all about section breaks, headers and footers (which is essential–one easy way to tell an amateur POD book from a professional one is to examine the complexity of the footers). I know how to use styles to generate a clickable Table of Contents.

And the best thing is, I’m getting to reacquaint myself with all the excellent poets and poems I published over the years.