An erudite and educational article about submitting poetry for commercial publication from Salt Publication. Asking questions like
why do you want to be published?
why would someone want to spend time and money reading your poems?
what is your unique selling point?
The questions raised can equally be applied to short stories and to literary fiction.
8 comments:
I have that book, 101 Ways to Make your Poems Sell. There is indeed a great deal of sound advice with applicability beyond the poetry world.
My favorite quote is this: "Poets writing in the manner of the nineteenth-century Romantics are advised to seek publishers from the same era." I've used it myself in workshops :)
Hope oxegen was sunny :)
Forsooth, that is a most excellent quotation! I will verily use it myself, begads.
Thanks for this - very helpful indeed! :)
Ditto short story writers writing like Liam O'Flaherty, Walter Macken et al. All very good in their time but we are in the 21st Century, begorrah.
I have no objection to hist fic (I love it, in fact) but it must be that, not modern stories written as if mobile phones etc were never invented. Begob.
Or my bugbear, priests and nuns and mountainy men and gossipy iron-haired married women in rural stories as if rural life has remained unchanged since the 50s. It hasn't. Begorrah
Thanks for that link, and the comments!
Poetry is a skill I've never mastered much as I'd love to, and reading it leaves me bewildered as often as inspired.
Maybe it's because I use it as a procrastination tool....oh speaking of which by the way...
How's the novel coming?
Hi Susan,
Thanks for dropping by. I', struggling to get a consistent voice in my novel, so I'm editing, hence the wordcount is not moving. thanks for asking
Voice, AGH! You've got all my sympathies with you now. But voice only comes when you're not trying; it's like "Don't think of elephants", It's so easy it's too hard. Or it's so hard it's too easy. Or something.
I've found the best way is, to sweat your [***] off for years on the
thing until your frustration finally bursts into a big tantrum of swearing and hair-pulling so that you finally say AH FORGET IT and just dump your bleeding heart all over the page.
Sounds dumb, but seriously. I did that and sent it to the Arts Council and then felt like I'd humiliated myself...but they gave me the grant, 15K. So it works.
Not that I'd recommend it. I take pills now.
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