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Choosing Content for “What We’re Made Of”

While choosing printers and making design decisions for this self-publishing venture is difficult enough, one of the hardest choices to make has been regarding book content. What We’re Made Of has multiple purposes. Its first purpose is to be enjoyable to those who read it, to have words and pictures that inspire, encourage or make one question. Its second purpose will be for me personally, as an easy-to-carry portfolio for when I meet people randomly; a business card only goes so far. As other fellow artists and writers know, it is troubling to decide what goes into a work, just for the love of it, and what goes into it, due to marketability. The ideal scenario is to find a happy medium, where one can be satisfied with the style of everything included, but also feel that it will be a smart move, in terms of employment and networking.

In an effort to provide a nice mix of my work, I have decided against separating my work by categories, like poetry, short stories and art. Instead, I am aiming to create a comfortable flow of words and visuals; this is leading me to create many written pages that have somewhat-related imagery near them. (For example, a poem that features a lot of color imagery may be placed beside a photograph that has many colors.)

There are two reasons for my organizing my book’s content this way. The first is that it promotes reading the book from front to back. People who are more inclined to visual or literary works tend to ignore the other half of a book (I do it, too), but a mix of both seems to always encourage me to take notice of the full book or magazine, rather than just parts of the whole. My second reason is that this fits within the “chapters” of my book.

What We’re Made Of is going to be separated into three sections: Inner Self & Outside World, Belief & Understanding, and Love & Hate. My goal is to have about fifteen to twenty pieces in each section, and I have already created some unseen works just for this publication. Considering I’m still in the design and content editing stages of this, the exact page number of the book is unknown even to me for now, but I’m estimating 50 to 80 pages; a lot depends on time for me. I will be getting test prints of this book by the end of October and will feature some pictures of it in a post.

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