BookBuild
Personal Professional Service & Support

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

Proofreading & Copy Editing for poetry mauscripts.

Offering detailed grammatical refinement and proofing of your manuscript content to ensure a spotless and cogent final manuscript 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.”

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.

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).

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