What she wanted
To self-publish her first collection with care and no rush, and to produce a special hand-designed edition alongside a print-on-demand run.
The fish find their water...
By the look of things...
Kory arrived with a cover in mind before she had words for most of it. Fish, swimming across the front of the book and around to the back. She designed much of it herself, and Pedro built it out from there. Over a few rounds we worked the title and her name into the right place so they sat with the art rather than on top of it.
She decided, in the end, to leave the back cover bare. When her first printed copies arrived without an ISBN barcode, she liked them better that way, and since the book lives on Lulu, nothing required one. The fish were left to swim.
Inside the book
The interior was as much Kory’s as the cover. She asked for one long poem to span two facing pages, placed a few photographs near the end, and went through every proof again with fresh eyes. We sorted out the things a personal collection like this needs settled: trim size, the feel of the paper she looked forward to touching, and the credits she wanted right.
She also wanted something rarer than a standard print run: a special edition, hand-finished, to give to family and keep. She sourced printers for it and carved woodblock prints to hand out as a first wave of promotion. We helped her weigh quotes and specs while the main edition moved ahead on Lulu.
Lulu handles the rest. We assigned her ISBN, set up the account, prepared the files, and sent a printed proof. Readers can order i laughed did you laugh? online, and Kory can pull author copies whenever she needs them, including for her release party.
What she found
Kory didn’t set out to write a book about her father. She set out to write a haiku a day. The book was already there by the time she went looking for it, waiting in a year of small entries she’d made without knowing what they’d add up to. That’s the strange gift of a daily practice: it keeps the record before you understand there’s a record to keep. If something has been quietly gathering in you, it may be worth stopping to read back what you’ve already written.