Such a Hoot!  As reported in this column two weeks ago, Yes, I’m putting out a NEW CD of my poems and graphics (see cover label attached). In the previous 48 years of writing and publishing I’ve done chapbooks, a DVD, Facebook postings, a creative newsletter “Taproot & Aniseweed,” a weekly BLOG, and this column for 10 years, so a CD is the most compact way to further the Hoot of self-publishing. (I have no patience to submit material and wait for rejection or publication by others. Been there, done that!) A designer is a designer is a designer. So, a dozen Read-Only Memorex disks were bought last month from Office Max, Vallejo when I first gave this project some thought, along with their colored jewel cases as they’re called. I had some leftover CD label blanks from a previous project and I bought 100 new 2 x 4” white mailing labels also to go through our colored HP printer. Add to that $80 of fresh ink cartridges for the printer. On your marks, get ready…
I launched on this past Father’s Day Sunday! One must be dead nuts on the CD label layout on your desktop computer as there are two-up labels per sheet to go through the printer. Circular holes to avoid and/or stay within. As to design, the label photo was all important! Bob Dylan has a black and white, polka-dotted shirt on his “MTV Unplugged” album of a hundred years ago, so I always wanted one. I found one online and bought it. The Fedora hat was a part of a get-up I wore last year at a Benicia State Capitol event, so that too was important and found and purchased online WITH a classy red feather!
Bummer, some color shift was occurring while labels were coming out of the printer, so I  had to Auto-clean the printheads. Done. Peel the labels as they come out and apply to the CD disks. Dead nuts, looking good! Hook up the external CD drive to the MacBook Air laptop and go through the drill of “How to Burn the pdf file ‘Pedro’s Poems & Graphics – 2018’ to disk and Eject.” But before ejecting, open the new disk file while in the computer and make sure that all pages and text and colors and photos made it! Yippee, looking Good! Now do this six times more, and do the first six envelope mailing labels and go to the post office and find out how much a cushioned shipping envelope ($1.19 +tax) is gonna cost and Parcel Post mailing FIRST CLASS ($3.50!) because cushioned mailers have to travel as Parcel Post. Wow! Consider non-cushioned envelopes only as maybe the jewel cases are sufficient for protection. Mail these first 4-5 and get ready for more as the checks ($21.95) start rolling in!

(Graphic by Peter Bray)

Peter Bray lives, works, and writes in Benicia
and has written this column since 2008.

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