It’s finally arrived! This has been a personal passion project and a dream that I didn’t think I was capable of accomplishing. I went to one or two Christian publishing houses and asked if they publish poetry books, and their reply was that they did not. I had a feeling they wouldn’t because I’ve been to Christian bookstores and have never once seen a “Christian poetry” book. Even after searching on Amazon, I only found a handful to purchase.
Regardless, I still wanted to create this compilation of some old poems that I had written years ago. Basically, some years after giving my life to Christ I was substitute teaching at various schools in my area. Teachers have planning periods, which are blocks of time from 45 minutes to even an hour and a half, where they plan their lessons or grade papers. Since I did neither of those as a sub, I basically was sitting around in an empty class or outside while the students were in P.E. Having nothing to do, I began writing out my interpretations of certain bible verses and how I imagined them to apply to my present life. I ended up creating poetry that I never knew I could create. After putting them in a notebook I decided to type them up, just in case I would ever lose that notebook and wouldn’t remember what I wrote clearly.
For years they just sat in my Dropbox (cloud storage website) folder for safe keeping, and I went back and edited them some more and adding images to each one. I also wrote a few more, and did nothing else with them. I posted a few here on my blog and on a Christian poetry site and that’s it.
Another Christian geek like myself had been publishing on Amazon Kindle/Paperback for a few years and had at least 3 volumes of a devotional style book printed. I contacted him and he gave me some good tips on how to go about putting it all together for self-publishing. I got to work on creating my first draft, and little by little the book came together. I organized the poems, paid for a front/back cover, edited them again, made an introduction and after I felt it was ready I completed the process on Amazon.
The paperback involved more precise work, like editing my “about the author” on the back to fit the barcode or figuring out Create Space. I hired a virtual assistant to help me do that, as I felt if I didn’t I would never see it finished. Thankfully, the guy really knew what he was doing and it was done in a week or so. God has been faithful through this whole process. My pastor has also allowed me to put copies for sale on the church bookshelves, but I made a promise to God that any proceeds made from the book would go to ministry work. So, if this book blows up and I make millions, I won’t get a penny of it.
I hope you will purchase my book in either format you wish below. Let me know what you thought of it by leaving a review, that would mean a lot to me and help improve my rank on Amazon for the book. God bless!
Illuminations: 30 Poems From God’s Heart To Yours (Paperback)