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By: jeannine

jeannine — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 18:25:00 +0000

I thought I'd post my Dad's hilarious responses to this essay, a tongue-in-cheek suggestion list for selling poetry!

Now there are ways to sell your books. Here are some ideas.
1. Become leader of some country and make your book mandatory reading for
all citizens. This worked with Mao and His Little Red Book.
2. Start a religion and make your books required reading for all your
converts. This worked pretty well with the Bible and even with L. Ron
Hubbard.
3. Include your poetry in a vital user manual for a computer system and
imbed the instructions necessary to run the computer in your poems as hints.
Actually some of the .Net books seem to be written like this already.
4. Invent a new game or cross word puzzle in which the answers are fill in
the blanks from your poetry. You have the target audience, females, and the
theme, superheroes. This worked quite well for Rubic with his cube and with
suduko.
5. Become a political activist and write the manifesto in poetry like Karl
Marx.
6. Talk to Post or Kellogg's and get them to put your poetry on ceral boxes.
This might require winning several gold medals at the Olympics first.
7. Embed your poetry in comics, songs, fortune cookies or some other treat
like Jorge Cham: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php
8. Start a web site in which people can post their poetry, charge a fee and
slip you poetry in as advertising. This sure worked well for www.youtube.com
. I bet you would be surprised at how popular such a site would become.
So see there are ways but you have to be creative.
The other way is to be a teacher and slowly but surely your fame will grow :)

By: Radish King

Radish King — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 16:55:00 +0000

I don’t think any of us middlin’ poets expect to sell the amount of books Billy Collins sells. The selling business is sweat and supporting each other and doing what needs to be done, certainly, but that’s the best we can expect. Some people are lucky and can make it a full time business. Others sit at home filing their nails waiting for someone else to make them famous. Good luck. Most of us just scumble along as best we can. I think it’s a non-issue that hasn’t changed much over the years.

By: jeannine

jeannine — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 16:43:00 +0000

Dear R,
That is pretty much my happy-dance moment also.
But the essay is a good reminder of how difficult it is to promote a book of poetry, even if you have the will and the time.

By: Radish King

Radish King — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 16:36:00 +0000

I wish I could make my editor rich. i doubt that will happen. And I never expected to get rich playing the poetry game. What pleases me is selling one or two books at a time and hearing later from the readers that they loved them. Maybe I have lower expectations, but that’s where the big bang lies for me.

By: jeannine

jeannine — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 15:51:00 +0000

Dear Karen,
I know you do – I do too! and a lot of the peeps who read this blog probably do as well. I think the majority, however, do not.
I must be hauling ten boxes of poetry books around with me on my moves – that’s got to prove some kind of dedication, right? 🙂

By: Karen J. Weyant

Karen J. Weyant — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 14:13:00 +0000

I hear that a lot — that poets don’t buy poetry books, and I have always found that a bit odd because I do buy poetry books — in fact, poetry books make up the biggest part of my collection!!! But I’ve always said that in some ways, I’m more of a reader than a writer.

By: jeannine

jeannine — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 23:48:00 +0000

Yes, something along the genre of “So You Think You Can Write…”
Or perhaps “Project Poetry.”

By: Felicity

Felicity — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 23:15:00 +0000

v. depressing stuff about the state of trying to sell poetry. Obviously something extreme is in order.

Someone needs to pitch "America's Next Top Poet" to the studios.