I haven’t written anything in a couple of weeks and it’s making me a little…scratchy. I’m not a poem-a-day person, but I like to at least write one every two weeks!
I got two rejections and an acceptance today. After weeks of nothing. Isn’t that always the way.
A poem of mine is out in the new issue of The Cincinnati Review. It’s one of my “element” series, called “Cesium Burns Blue.” It’s one of my husband’s favorite poems. The issue also has poems by Nance Van Winckel, Chase Twichell, and Sherman Alexie.
Speaking of Alexie, he went on The Colbert Report and talked about how the local media doesn’t care about books any more. I don’t know if you noticed, Sherman, but it’s not that they don’t care, it’s that local media doesn’t really exist any more. Little newspapers – and big ones – are drying up and blowing away. Local news and radio shows are getting swallowed up by big conglomerates.
And, tell me what you think, but the local radio shows and newspaper stories don’t really sell books – or not any more than say, a blog or a web site might.
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
Radish King
I sold most of my books from my blog. Of course I didn’t sell a million books but yeah, the blog was, and is, key.
Newspapers in Seattle, rather the only big newspaper left in Seattle, is in a sorry state, but so are the independent bookstores.
Maybe publishing won’t be a BIG MONEY MAKER in the future. Maybe writers will sell their books from their blogs or websites and to their friends and families and at readings. I’m not sure that’s altogether a bad thing. It worked for Oscar Wilde. (I have a post card with his picture on it in front of me so he came to mind). He died penniless etc. but we still know who he is.
Maybe in the end, it will be the great writers who are remembered and there won’t be so much crap floating around. Who knows.
xor
January
I get to test the waters in a week or so when my book comes out (woo hoo). But I’m guessing the blog will be the biggest influence in selling books, as well as Twitter.
Congrats on your poem in The Concinnati Review!