BookBuild
Personal Professional Service & Support
A collaborative effort of editors and digital design, offering expert services tailored for your self-publishing success
"BUILDING YOU A BEAUTIFUL BOOK"
Editing
Developmental Editing, Copy Editing & Proofreading. Presently this service is only for poetry.
Ensuring polished designs to compete in our contemporary world market
Curating your work to fit the field of the page comfortably to the eyes and natural aesthetic senses of your readers
Design
Formatting
Our Expertise
Serving self-publishing minded authors by refining their manuscripts with professional precision and creating compelling digital designs and clean, comfortable layouts ready to submit to printers and digital publishing platforms, and to promote on personal websites and social media.
Our Services
Expert support for every step of your self-publishing journey.
Offering both à la carte pricing and a variety of publishing packages, allowing you to contract for only the services you need.
Editing
Refining your poetry manuscript from developmental editing to copy editing to and final proofreading.
Design
Compelling, professional cover design, interior layout, and promotional images tailored to your book.
Formatting and file generation that ensures your book looks perfect in a variety of platforms or devices.
Formatting
Our Team
Personal, collaborative support from experienced Editors & Designers.
Lorrie Wolfe
Copy Editing and Proofreading for poetry manuscripts.
Lorrie says that her job is not to change your voice or style, but to make it clearer, more consistent and more intentional. She looks for the pacing and precision that will make your poetry stand out. Paying attention to the details that polish your manuscript, she identifies areas of strength, makes suggestions and collaborates with you to deliver a final document that you can be proud to present. She offers detailed grammatical refinement and proofing of your manuscript content to ensure a spotless and cogent final product for publication or submission.
Lorrie Wolfe is an award-winning editor, poet, and technical writer. She specializes in editing poetry. She has edited poems, fiction, and non-fiction for over 40 years, including chapbooks, stories, memoirs, government reports and grant proposals. Her poems have been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. She won the 2024 Fledge Poetry Chapbook Award from Middle Creek Press for The Language of Crows. She served as poetry editor for RISE: An Anthology of Change, which won the 2020 Colorado Book Award. Her work has appeared in The Mountain, Earth’s Daughters, Pilgrimage, Plant-Human Quarterly, Encore, and more. After many years as a community organizer, she still believes in the power of words to unite and move people, including poets. Her two-word mantra is “Show up.”
Book Editing
RISE: An Anthology of Change, Northern Colorado Writers, 2019
(Winner, 2020 Colorado Book Award)
Chiaroscuro: An Anthology of Virtue and Vice, Northern Colorado Writers, 2021
Exception/All - Northern Colorado Writers, 2023
Mountains, Myths and Memories: a Poetry Anthology, 2017
Going Deeper Anthology, with Kurtis Tilley, 2017
Kathleen Willard
Developmental Editing for Poetry Manuscripts.
Developmental editing is a key step to polishing your manuscript in order for it to shine and stand out in the crowded universe of literary publishing. Investing in this step will help your manuscript come into sharper focus. Take advantage of Willard’s insightful and razor sharp editing as Willard focuses on the whole concept of your book, keeping the integrity of your voice, a keen eye on poetic craft and the fine art of organizing your manuscript. Willard offers successful and insightful arrangement and development of your manuscript's theme, pacing and delivery for best reception. Kathleen will provide you with an independent review of your manuscript through several careful readings to assess its architecture and aesthetics followed by an in depth analysis. She will provide you with meaningful and constructive feedback that preserves your poetic voice. Kathleen analyzes the structure of your manuscript, looking for potential narrative arcs or organizing principles. Each poem will be scrutinized with these important poetic aspects in mind, and offer reorganization or re-ordering of your poems, looking at the connectivity between all the poems and anything which might be compromising the structure or narrative arc of your manuscript. Willard then narrows her focus on individual poems. She examines each word, line, and stanza to offer feedback to build the strongest poem possible without interfering with your voice or your vision. Her goal is to build you a better book.
Unique, collaborative and competitive book cover designs tailored to a contemporary market, quality interior layouts, and file prep and generation for diverse printing, presentation and reading formats.
David Martin founded Middle Creek Publishing & Audio in 2015 and has operated the press since that time as its founding editor, and has become known for his beautifully designed books, covers and interiors. Under Martin's direction and vision, MCP&A has become a widely notable small press, distinguished both by its compelling covers, beautiful interiors, and quality content throughout the Rocky Mountain West region and beyond.
Martin takes a personal and collaborative approach, working with the author's vision and concepts for their book, and refining and envisioning it for them in ways they may not have considered. He will offer several concepts for your cover, consult and take feedback from you and make revisions to sculpt and hone it to the point where you love it and it becomes the identity of your soon-to -be-published book.
TESTIMONIALS:
"David Anthony Martin designed the cover and format for my poetry collection Mother Octopus (co-winner of the Halcyon Prize, Middle Creek Press). He understood my vision for my manuscript and created a beautiful book that honored my ideas and input. He's also an enthusiastic and deeply insightful editor."
—Sarah Giragosian, author of Mother Octopus, Queer Fish, Death Spiral, and What Kind of Hawk
“I loved making a book with David Martin. He’s responsive and dedicated to making a beautiful book in service to sharing the words with the world. I love his covers, his skill with formatting, his knowledge of the publishing world. I highly recommend him as a book designer and publisher.”
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of Hush
David Martin
Cover & Interior Design and Formatting/ File Creation for Print Services.
Testimonials:
Kathleen Willard has worked with me on two chapbooks, both of which won contests and went on to publication. Kathleen is part editor, part midwife, and 100% a tireless advocate for poetry. Kathleen helped me take my individual poems and weave them together into a whole work of art. She showed me how to invite the reader in, create a natural flow from poem to poem, and lead the reader on a journey. Kathleen's keen eye found the connections (and disconnections) in my themes, mood, and imagery—like a voice coach who could hear the off notes, her suggestions made my manuscripts really sing."
—Amy Wray Irish, author of Breathing Fire (Middle Creek Publishing & Audio), Winner of The Fledge Poetry Chapbook Award, 2020 and Down to the Bone (Wild Rising Press), Winner of the Poetry Mesa Chapbook Contest, 2023.
"Kathleen Willard took my manuscript, The Fragile Intersect and considered it in a whole new way. I had been working on this for a few years and it felt cumbersome and unwieldy. I needed to have it coalesce. She rearranged the order, changed the sections, while culling the poems leaving only the best. She helped organize my thinking and my manuscript, and she also helped the poems become the most precise they could be. I recommend Kathleen for anyone who is stuck in their own thinking and needs a fresh view and reworking of their creation. She does not change your overall concept. She simply brings it into focus. This is a skill that is needed and lacking in the area of editing, and I am very happy with the results.
—Lynn Kincanon, Loveland, Colorado Poet Laureate, and author of The Fragile Intersect
Kathleen Willard is a real pro. She provided both great developmental editing and copy editing for my poetry chapbook. Not only did she catch the big-picture places where poems needed to be in a different order, she addressed stanzas, lines and even punctuation. She noted places to improve and gave positive comments and encouragement for things that were working. She didn’t try to change my voice—she made it clearer. Subsequently, my chapbook The Language of Crows won the Middle Creek Publishing and Audio’s Fledge Poetry Chapbook Award in 2024. I couldn’t have done it without her expert help. Kathleen is easy to work with, met all deadlines, and gave my poems polish. I highly recommend her for all levels of editing.
—Lorrie Wolfe, author of The Language of Crows (Middle Creek Publishing, 2025), winner of The Fledge Poetry Chapbook Award, 2024.
"Kathleen’s knowledge, enthusiasm, and approachability made it a delight to work with her. She has the ability to analyze a manuscript’s many elements, while always keeping the bigger picture of the whole book in mind. Kathleen encouraged me to think outside the box and enabled me to see my manuscript, as well as the poems in it, with fresh eyes."
—Melissa Huff, author of To Speak Each Day in its Own Language (Kelsey Press, 2025).
Testimonials:
Lorrie Wolfe is a consummate professional, whose specific and structured feedback would prove useful to anyone in need of editing assistance. The piece she edited went on to win the Gladys Feld Helzberg Prize and was published in Veterans Voices. I enjoyed working with Lorrie, and can attest to her level of knowledge, as well as her attention to detail. She possesses a brilliant balance of calm encouragement and line-level analytics. I highly recommend her services.
—Laura Mahal, Fort Collins, Colorado, 2019
"Lorrie is the best at giving gentle critiques, not too harsh and always professional. She interspersed positive comments in her editing which were appreciated. Our set deadline was met and she kept me on track. It’s in the small things and the polish that she added to each poem that elevated my material into a higher category. Her suggestions were gratefully accepted. I highly recommend her to anyone looking for an editor. Her varied background makes her qualified to tackle the most difficult project."
—Belle Schmidt, Fort Collins, Colorado, 2021
“I’m grateful…I found my person: Lorrie Wolfe. She helped me clean up [the manuscript], consulted with me on what was missing, listened and suggested. As a fellow poet, her encouragement was invaluable…Priceless perspective.”
—Valerie Johns, Psychotherapist, Los Angeles, California, Author of Ashes in the Milk, 2023
“Working with Lorrie has been a wonderful experience. Her editorial insight, sense of humor, and genuine care for the work made the entire process both enjoyable and extremely valuable. She is a thoughtful and skilled editor. I'm grateful for the clarity and confidence she brought to my manuscript.”
—Marie Calixte, White Plains, New York, 2025, Author of Serenity,
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