See Me in Orion Magazine / Self Publishing a Memoir

I have a photo and a caption in the current July / August issue of Orion. I love that on the page after me is a piece by Bill McKibben, and also in the issue work by Scott Russell Sanders. These guys have been major influences on my early environmental thinking. But to see my wife and sandhill cranes go to page 9.

I also won a $100 gift certificate from Prairie Nursery, 1st place in their photo contest for an image of a pasque flower (it's in the Flickr rotation on the top right of the blog).

I have decided to self publish my second memoir this summer--Sleep, Creep, Leap: The First Three Years of a Nebraska Garden. I went through so much wasted time and torture trying to find agents and presses for the other unpublished memoir--Morning Glory: A Story of Family and Culture in the Garden--that I just want to short circuit what seems to be a broken system and have more time to work on my Oklahoma memoir, Turkey Red (one more trip to Kansas and Oklahoma in the works). I have a PhD and MFA, tons of publications and awards, and I hear plenty of good things about my writing--in fact, SCL came close at one press. So, might as well try this.

I know that self publishing can be career suicide in my profession, a professor (an unemployed one), so I won't put it on my cv. My hope is to drum up enough sales to attract an agent or press, which seems to be the new paradigm in publishing. Of course, I could fall hard on my bum, too. But so what? I've been working on a cover image for Kindle, iPad, Nook, Sony Reader, Mac, and PC. Then I will work on the difficult specs for a print-on-demand paperback. I figure the ebook will be $3-4 and the paperback $7-10 (100 pages). Sound ok? How much would you pay for either?

Here's a table of contents for Sleep, Creep, Leap.

And here's the cover image I've been playing with (trying to make it look like both a how-to horticultural book and a literary memoir):

Me + Orion Magazine = Bam!

I'm going to have a picture and a short block of words in the July / August issue of Orion. It's one of my favorite publications, and now I've got my foot in the door. It's just so cool, you know?

The image is of my wife on a gravel country road trying to get close to some of the 500,000 sandhill cranes that come through here every spring. Link to this post to find the image.