It took, I believe, four uploads to get the print version finalized, and at least a couple of shots at having the Kindle one right (in that case, I'd mistakenly put the print edition's price on the ebook, but it still took a whole approval cycle to fix that), but now both new manifestations of my 1994 chapbook, Always, The End up and available. To be honest, there is still one scan->OCR->text->Word->Pub artifact typo in there (which I just discovered when creating the poem title listing for the new page on the Eschaton site), but it's reasonably invisible (enough so that I missed it in multiple fine-tooth-comb go-overs), at least in Arial, that I think I'll put it off until I find myself in some fit of OCD and really need to "fix" something (which will result in the books being unavailable for about 24 hours.I do wish there was a market for poetry ... but one of the very first things I discovered after starting Eschaton back in 1993 was that there just isn't any (which caused me to "pivot" and make Eschaton a "metaphysical press" rather than a "literary" imprint). So, realistically, this whole project is based on archival/historical concerns rather than desperate hopes that anybody's going to be buying any (the collection prior to this one, Beneath This Weight Of Chain, was my first release from Eschaton back in '93, and I put out ads with a cumulative readership of just over a million which resulted in one sale ... pretty depressing).
I've started already in on the next of these. Not having any "original" files is a challenge ... obviously, this book wasn't much of a issue in terms of generating a clean cover graphic, but the next one features a screened photo wrapping around the book, and it was a beast, as I had to work from scans that had residual light differences on either side of the spine, and a lot of munged-up pixels where the spine created a wrinkly ridge down the page. The scanner, at 600dpi, was picking up ALL those details. I just hope the less-than-seamless clone-and-paste pixel pushing I did doesn't look as blatantly obvious as I fear it does. That being said, I was quite relieved that I was able to get any sort of a decent scan on that - as the original is a grey-scale-on-mid-range item, and I was thrilled that I was able to mess enough with the contrast to get the background (which was a lavender cardstock) dropped back to close-to-white, allowing me (in grey-scale) to work on the over-printed image.
I was, however, disturbed to find that I did NOT have copies of my first six chapbooks in the place I thought they were ... only the second six. Now, I can't imagine that I have NO copies of these anywhere, I'm far too much of a "hoarder" for that, but it does mean that I'm going to have to indulge in some time-sucking "apartment archaeology" to find them. Of course, with those being the "early" stuff, it also means that there's no hope of their being on computer files, as the most recent of those six would date no later than 1986 (going back to 1979, if I'm recalling correctly). Still, it's arguable that those chapbooks are "my best work", and I'd really hope to be able to make them survive me, if possible (typically, back when I was writing 250 poems a year, I'd sort out the best 10% of a two-year output to be featured in the chapbooks).
Anyway, I now have two of the twelve "resurrected", which is something, I guess ...
