I love sharing my writing in different ways, particularly offline. When I released The Floating Harbour, I left a paper copy of each chapter, every Sunday, in a few different cafés in Bristol. I’ve also made a bunch of different poetry booklets that I have printed, folded, stapled, and then left around various places in Bristol to be taken or left, read or ignored.
These have all been for free, just as my writing is freely available here. All my writing will always be freely available in some form at least. Butyethowever, I wanted to experiment with offering poetry booklets for people to buy from me.
So, here is the idea: I am going to fill notebooks with hand-written poetry, making various selections from all those found on here, along with doodles and haiga. For example: one book might contain only tanka poems; another only free-verse poems; one might be full of poems that could be interpreted to all be touching on a certain theme; etc. They can also be partially or wholly bespoke – so, someone can make a list of my poems that they want, and those will be the ones I write in. Plus others, if there is space for it.
The two options are: a regular, page-turny notebook and an orihon, accordion notebook. Take at look at my unfinished examples below. (The accordion example here is only text, but would contain haiga and doodling, too.)
The price? The price… The price:
Regular notebook – £16
Accordion notebook – £27
I need to break even at the very least. No way can I afford to do it at a loss. So, I have priced them to hit just above breaking even, and will give the option for people to pay more if they wish, as a donation add-on. Here is a PDF that gives a price breakdown for both the regular and accordion notebooks, to give clarity on how I reached the prices that I’ve settled on:
If you are interested, please email me at will.altoft@googlemail.com, with “Notebooks For Sale” in the subject field. This can be simply to ask more about it, or to get to actually buying one. We can discuss what you’d like, and how to pay; where I’m sending it to, and when to expect it.
william altoft 