Thursday, 27 June 2013

WORK IT, WORK IT

I thought I should look around at the Kindle poetry market just to get an idea of what’s on offer, so I spent 90 mins prowling the free and paying selections. There wasn’t anything I felt drawn enough to buy but I took about twenty freebies. Mostly, I just wanted to see what poetry looked like on my e-reader, which is a Galaxy-note phone, so hopefully that might be the smallest window that readers will use to read. I’d been wondering whether to run the poems on, one after another with just a small space between them but now I’ve paid attention I know I want a page break between each; it’s cleaner and sharper.

What did spring to mind is how the lines that don’t fit the space fall under to continue so change the shape of the poem and takes away all power that would’ve been in the end-lines. So, if I’m going to publish my work in this medium I need to choose the poems for their shape or re-write some of them – I can do that. I’ve counted 32 spaces for the longest line my e-reader can take.

I’ve also discovered how to make a space above and below lines – all those years looking at that window and never realising that the darker text down in the little window below showed you the result of tinkering with the numbers above! Oh, I love it when a plan comes together. Btw, this is in Word 2003, Format/paragraph…and I was talking about the little boxes in the ‘Spacing’ section. If you change the numbers in the boxes titled, ‘Special’ (up on the right) in the ‘Indentation’ section, you can set your paragraphs – I chose 0.9 and manually moved the first paragraph to stay square.

A couple of the poetry books I got today had formatting problems where they’d obviously used ‘Enter’ to space between poems, and their paragraphs were all over the place. This is the difference between writers being too much in a hurry to get their work ‘out there’ when they should be learning how to publish first. Unfortunately, none of the poetry I’ve looked at tonight in these free e-books is worth paying for, so if I was dithering about how I’d decide to share my collection I’m now sure I don’t want to be in that kind of company. I’m in this for the adventure – any money will be a bonus, but I am going to choose something above £2.50.


When deciding which books I fancied today, I read the comments and reviews and also noticed the spaces where the writer has a chance to inform and charm a buyer – I’ll be working on those sections too now.

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