Book Cover Is Designed

I’m 1/3 of the way through putting the poems in the next book. I have them all chosen and grouped them by category.

I was up during the night and decided to look at the book cover stock photos on kdp site. I saw the choice of designing my own cover and decided to try that. I did use a picture of my oldest child and our dog for the cover of the Pet Poetry book I published.

I had taken some shots of the sky both morning and sunset and looked over them. I think I took them last week, but does it really matter? It was recently.

I sent my kids (all adults) copies of the photos and asked their opinion on the best one, but then went ahead and tried using one I liked and one thing led to another and I have my cover designed.

It took awhile, but I managed to finally insert this cover image. This is as big as I could make it, but I just want to show the photo I used and the title.

New Book Cover

Next Poetry Book

I’ve been working on my next poetry book this morning. I had planned to publish it by the end of August, but unexpected company arrived, and I set it aside for a few days.
I wanted 100 poems, but as I read each one and entered it into the proper category, I whittled them down to 88. I’m still not sure I’ll include them all.
My first book of poems was 27 pages long. It was titled Pet Poetry and is for sale on Amazon.com
This next book contains mostly other poems that I’ve written over the years. I did include seven of the pet poems – my favorites, but some of them may get cut in the final editing.
I put the poems in different categories. There are nine categories. I thought that way if a reader has no interest in a topic, they might skip those poems. I do hope every reader reads every poem, but I know that won’t happen.
As I read the poems, I made little corrections and changed a few words. It’s surprising after you let something you’ve written get cold (leave it for awhile and come back and reread it), how you see something you think would sound better, if you changed it
I also worked on the book’s cover. I made my own cover for the poetry book, and used a stock photo/cover from the site for the Black History Raps book. That was not a good title after all, as it is rhymes to help children remember Historical African Americans, and also contains worksheets and center activities (I think they call centers “learning stations” now), but somehow the rappers didn’t like it and the teachers missed finding it. I plan to republish that before next February and change the title. I will probably add to it and maybe even reorganize it.
I love to write. I try to save everything I write. If something isn’t going well, it might go better when I return to it. I can usually see what the problem was.
Oh, and this is very exciting . . . I’m writing a book I refer to as the Blindman book. My daughter brought some more of my things from the storage unit and in a box was a binder filled with chapters I had printed out from the Blindman book. I got a new computer and didn’t think I had all the things I’d written on that book transferred, and was trying to rewrite parts, but now maybe I won’t need to.
I’m also working on a book I refer to as my Horse book. I also have a children’s illustrated book in progress.
I have various writing projects, but it looks like this poetry book will be the next one published.
I use KDP at Amazon.com. It’s a self-publishing site and I’ve been very pleased with it.