Haiku - Through a Lens

As mentioned in my previous post, "Haiku - Through a Lens" is a collection of some sixty-odd ("don't say it, Kevin, just don't...") haiku teamed with photographs I've taken while out and about.

To celebrate its publication, I'm offering some (seventeen - but of course) copies to commenters on this blog.

After some time futzing with settings, the book is now available for purchase(!) at Amazon: Haiku - Through a Lens for reading on Kindle and various app formats of same. A version in ePub is available from Barnes & Noble for reading on their Nook - it can be purchased here.

Given there are many color photographs in the book, viewing on the Kindle hardware itself, or the original Nook will take some of the impact away. I have checked the book out using the Kindle app on a laptop, an iPad and and iPod Touch. Other than needing to shrink the font size on the iPod Touch to avoid wrapping of the text, it reads very well.

It also previews nicely on the software version of the color Nook and on the Nook app for the iPad.

I tried to use Smashwords for conversion to additional formats and ran up against a size limitation. Haiku - Through a Lens is just short of 5.5MB in its Word Doc format. This, even after taking the Smashwords suggestion of getting Word to compress the images (things were worse before that step.) The current size is above the 5MB limit for Smashwords' Meatgrinder conversion tool.

Short of taking some of the photographs out (my own first thought, but swiftly rejected), any thoughts on what I might do?

So, what about these seventeen copies? The first seventeen haiku comments on this blog entry will gain their authors a copy of the book. I have versions suitable for Kindle and Kindle app, Nook and also PDF. Let me know what format suits you best.

Here's an example of the book's contents:














I hope you enjoy it.

What to do with all these Haiku?

Those who have seen my tweets passing by in the timeline (what an odd construction that is...) or as part of the "news" page on facebook, or yet again, off to the right on this blog will have detected my fondness for the simple, though not easy, form of poetry known as Haiku.

How I love a sentence that runs pell-mell all over a page!

According to my Twitter page I've sent over 1,900 tweets. The vast majority of these will have been the short seventeen-syllable scraps of thought in poetic form. With enough practice you can get competent at anything. So, some of the haiku I've composed are good, arresting even. Some, by the same token, are pretty bad - but then, I'm recovering from a lifetime of perfectionist tendencies (not, I assure you, of perfection).

What to do with all these Haiku, I ask? Well, nothing actually. Nothing, at least with the vast majority of them. I quite like the fact that most of them are ephemeral. Less so than I thought as it turns out. I was quite surprised to discover how far back I could go along my Twitter timeline.

No matter, once composed and dropped into the timeline, I consider them off on their own. (Write if you get work, y'hear?)

However (there's always a "however", isn't there?), I've sometimes included a photograph I'd taken with a tweet, combining an image with the verse. These, of necessity, had to be hosted on some web site for viewing. And so they remained.

It was suggested that I might assemble them into an electronic book form. It's possible others might enjoy viewing and reading a collection of these #PhotoHaiku, as I called them within Twitter.

I imagined I might have sixteen or twenty to pull together. So it might make something interesting to view. I was wrong, I assembled over sixty of these photo and poetry combinations, grouping them into three sections:

• Light and Darkness
• Travel
• Seasons

I wondered how I was going to do it, and found that Scrivener, the tool I use on the Mac for my writing, has all the capabilities I needed to handle both the images and the text, in addition to generating native Kindle and Nook formats. The ePub format it generates also works for Apple's iBook - but Apple requires an ISBN - and I didn't have $125 handy.

And so, Haiku - Through a Lens was born. I'm currently thinking through how best to launch it, but the act of pulling together the images and text, grouping them in some coherent way and generating the final output was invigorating.

I must do this again.