Frequently asked questions

What’s your advice for growing a following?
Build a community. Find other people doing what you’re doing that inspire you and support them. Like their stuff and leave authentic comments on their posts. I don’t know anyone who’s grown a social media account without actual genuine connections. Focus more on the actual people that will resonate with your work vs. thinking about the numbers.

Post regularly. Social media rewards those who are constantly creating content for their platform. One of my biggest pet peeves is when I get asked how to grow a following from someone who has 20 posts. Baby, you just have to post!

Posting regularly gives you a chance to try out a ton of different ideas and see what works. It’s easy to get in your head and think that no one wants you to post that often, but one good thing about social media algorithms is that not everyone is going to see everything you post.

I posted once a day for about a year on Instagram to get my first 20k followers, and once a day on TikTok for three months to get my first 50k followers.

Use hashtags. I started with just poetry hashtags on Instagram and then some book ones when my book came out. Start with one type (e.g. poetry) and think of creative ways you can expand that through what you post and your hashtags. I don’t use hashtags as much on TikTok, but you’ll see that a lot of big creators use unrelated viral hashtags all the time… so it probably works.

How long did it take you to grow your social accounts?
I made my Instagram in 2017 and my TikTok in 2020. Growing an Instagram is way harder than growing a TikTok and I make most of my book sales from TikTok. Do with that what you will!

Do you think it’s a bad idea to post poetry on social media before I have a published book?
I think it’s a bad idea to not post anything before publishing a book! I posted around 80% of the poems in my first book on Instagram before I published it. I definitely recommend building an audience before publishing (unless you don’t really care if you sell books).

Anything you post on social media is still your intellectual property so you don’t have to worry about copyrights (I’ve posted poems from all my books before publishing them but I’m not a lawyer, so if you’re super paranoid, contact one).

How did you self-publish?
I did some Googling and found that a ton of reputable poets first published their debut collections with Amazon’s Createspace (now Kindle Direct Publishing). After a lot of research (there are a ton of resources on forums and just through Google), I realized it was actually way easier than I thought to self-publish. So I started piecing my poems together from Instagram, grouping them by themes that made sense, and then ordering them in an overall narrative that felt right for a book. I used Adobe InDesign to format my interior files for both books and worked with designers for the covers (and interior images for You’ll Come Back to Yourself). After finally clicking submit, my books had fully populated on Amazon within a few hours!

If you want to know the specific steps I took, you can purchase my Self-Publishing Guide for Kindle Direct Publishing here.

Where are your self-published books available?
I published When He Leaves You, You’ll Come Back to Yourself and You’ll Come Back to Yourself Journal using KDP. You can buy them on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Book Depository and Indigo. They sometimes get sold in stores because of KDP’s expanded distribution.

You’ll Come Back to Yourself was available in Target stores for a bit and I don’t know how, it just happened. My best guess is that it was related to one of my viral TikToks.

How do you get stores to stock your book if you self-publish?
If you market your book well enough, more book store buyers will know about it. It doesn’t guarantee they’ll order it, but it increases the likelihood. The more your book is known, the more likely customers will request it which also influences buyers for some stores.

I manually contacted Indigo (email: newauthor@indigo.ca) to get my books on their site, which also gave stores the opportunity to order them, but all indie book stores and Barnes & Nobles stock my books without me doing anything (other than marketing them and having them available to order on KDP’s expanded distribution).

If you have a relationship with a local bookstore, they might sell your book on consignment. I’ve only done this once so I don’t have much to say about it, ask your local bookstore if they accept books on consignment and they’ll tell you about the process.

How much does it cost to self-publish?
Short answer: it’s free.

Long answer: you can really put as much money as you want into it! KDP is print-on-demand (they only print books when someone orders them), so you don’t have to spend any money if you don’t want to.

If you want to order proofs (pre-published versions of your book to check for formatting, spelling, etc.) they are now pretty cheap for the U.S. and Canada. For Poems for the Signs, I only paid $10 for each proof including shipping. But again, you don’t have to spend any money–you can preview exactly how your interior and cover will look online.

For my first two books, I paid designers for cover art (vs. trying to do it myself or using Google Images), which I thought was important in making them feel like legitimate books. I got a friend to proof read When He Leaves You for free, but didn’t get anyone to proof read You’ll Come Back to Yourself (and there were a few typos because of it… which I since fixed haha). If you don’t know how to use software like Adobe InDesign to format your book (though I think you could probably do simple formatting with Google Docs), you might want to pay a designer to do that as well.

Once I got an iPad and felt a little more comfortable with illustrations, I did them myself for Please Love me My Worst, Poems for the Signs and There Is Room for All of You Here. So if you feel good about your illustration and design ability, feel free to DIY!

Should I pay a publisher to publish my book?
Short answer, NO.

There are so many scams out there, don’t pay $2,000 to publish your book. You can do it on KDP for free. Any publisher who asks for money from you has their entire business model based on manipulating you into paying them, not on helping you sell books (an exception would be Ingramspark but that’s only $50).

If you’re considering paying someone, Google them and look at reviews–most have results about them being scams on the first page. Watch out for yourself & trust your gut!

What’s the difference between your books?
If you’re more visual, you can watch this TikTok about all my books here.

I wrote When He Leaves You first and think of it as a lifetime of poems split into six sections. It starts off with childhood and my parents’ divorce, goes through dating a lot of the wrong people, falling in love fast, going through heartbreak, and finding self love. The last section (called ‘perspective’) has poems about losing my nana and gaining a new perspective on life and love.

You’ll Come Back to Yourself is more of a snapshot in time, split into three sections. It’s about realizing love wasn’t what you thought it was, being lied to, infidelity, and depression. It’s about figuring out that the point of going through all that was to learn how resilient you are, and to come back to yourself in a new way.

You’ll Come Back to Yourself Journal includes the same poetry as the original collection, updated to be gender neutral. It has 45 journal prompts and lines to write on along with 5 full journal pages in the back of the book. You can watch this TikTok for examples of prompts.

Please Love Me at My Worst has four sections about learning to love your inner child, the worst parts of yourself, who you are, and who you’re becoming. It has themes of inner child healing, grief, not letting go of past relationships, feeling alone, accepting yourself and your sexuality, and being excited about who you’re becoming.

Poems for the Signs explores the twelve astrological signs through poetry. Starting with Aries and ending with Pisces, it's a collection about looking for love, self-reflection, depression, healing ancestral patterns, and finding beauty in being alone. It has themes of finding yourself, being frustrated with dating, family, grief and loss. Though it’s sectioned by astrological sign, anyone can read it from front to back and find meaning in it.

There Is Room for All of You Here is an excavation of the past that leads to a celebration of queer love. Separated into three sections: Stumbling, Falling, and Landing, it’s about complicated family relationships, reconciling with your anxious attachment style, finding a healthy love, and building something you hope will last.

Please Look into the Mirror is about facing the darkness to find light. Separated into three sections: Glass, Mirror, and Reflection, it’s about the mother wound, gaining a deeper sense of self, learning to take accountability and finding relief in cycle breaking.

What’s it like to be an author?
First I wanna say I don’t think this is a universal experience, a lot of authors can’t support themselves financially with just writing and need other jobs so I’m super lucky.

But honestly it’s the dream!

My life feels like every day is Friday? Like summer in high school? Like the four day weekends I had in university but even longer? My job is just to be inspired and write my silly little poems and be creative.

It feels like I was put on the earth to do it and finding a community that feels all the feels I do is bonkers cause I’ve been a sad girl™ my whole life and have felt quite lonely in it. But so many of my readers are sad girls™ too and I love it (I mean, I wish we were all happy girls but you know what I mean).

Last thing, I am very proud of myself for taking the leap and writing about my emotions so publicly. It’s the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever done but also the best.

When did you start writing poetry?
I like to say that I’ve always been a writer - I’ve regularly written in a journal since I was seven. I remember writing (what I think was) my first poem at 8-years-old when my cat passed away. I really got back into it after taking a creative writing class with Canadian author, Carrie Snyder, at the University of Waterloo. Before that class, I thought the point of poetry was to be secretive, using metaphors that only I could understand. She gave me great feedback, something along the lines of, “This is well-written, but I have no idea what it means.” After that class, I started posting poetry on my personal Instagram, but it never really felt right. @michaelapoetry was born in May of 2017 and I’ve been posting poems there ever since!

What inspires you to write?
I honestly can be inspired by the simplest things - like buying new towels or accomplishing a good eyeliner wing. But usually I use writing as catharsis. When I’m going through something difficult, whether it be heartbreak, relationship issues, or a loss, I always find that writing things out makes everything make more sense. It’s nice to not focus on whether your writing is “good” and more on how it makes you feel.

How do you pronounce your name?
Mi-kay-la Ang-ga-mere