Scraps
You know all those poems of high school pain and college angst they say you should never, ever publish? In 2004, I published mine.
Scraps is, in fact, a collection of scraps — snippets of verse, prose and song lyrics scribbled onto the backs of envelopes, cigarette pack flaps, ATM receipts… anything that happened to be at hand when an idea struck me. In the book, they are presented unedited and formatted on the page as closely as I could emulate their formatting on whatever they were written on.
Scraps also represents my first foray into the world of digital self-publishing. Within eight hours of disovering that CafePress had added book publishing to their list of services, a digital copy of Scraps was created, formatted, uploaded and ready for sale online. Within a few days, I had high-quality (I’m speaking striclty of paper and binding here) copies of my very first book in my hands. What’s more, the slim volume of Scraps takes up a lot less shelf space than that shoebox full of crumpled paper.
Scraps is currently out of print.