Neophyte
Blogging is a new experience: I've read other's blogs with varying degrees of apathy and fascination and still wonder, with everyone and their aunt, (or uncle for those of a PC disposition), why any particular blog is any more exciting or interesting than another.
I am a poet, singer, composer (of the classical variety), run with my wife an open mike in York (www.yorkspokenword.org.uk) and small press publisher www.stairwellbooks.co.uk, also with my wife, Rose Drew.
One of the difficulties with sharing poems in a blog is that the poems become ineligible for competition in that they are considered published. Rather than making my latest and greatest poems ineligible I will focus on the trials and tribulations of running an open mike and publishing poetry. I will at some point vent about the Amazonian behemoth that will, if left to stomp unchecked, kill independant publishing as stone dead as it left Borders.
I would really like to find a way to bring all the small press publishers together to create a more effective lobby for our authors, perhaps forge new pathways to bring our books to the attention of the general public, and find ways for us all to cooperate in developing new ways of selling our books.
Several Write Out Loud Authors have been included in our anthologies including Winstom Powes, Tim Ellis and John Coopey.
A
Alan Gillott
Thu 10th Nov 2011 18:35
Wow! Thank you for responding. I'm inclined to agree with the both of you. In our more tentative days we went down the chapbook path; it was a very good way of testing the market on the universality of our poetry. Certainly, a £15 chapbook really appears to be over the top - I would demur from buying anything over £5. We recently started doing poet's chapbooks under our Spoken Word open mike imprint and we are sticking at £3.50.
There is a certain circularity about books primarally targetted at other poets and we certainly notice a bit of home market saturation. One challenge is to get the attention of new readers - we try, though it is often only one new reader at a time.
MCN's point is well made: in classical music there is a definate move back to a diatonic scale, albeit presented in a modern fashion; and poetry too needs to ensure there is an universal appeal. Sadly, school poetry has ruined many people's palatte and I see too many poems that try to rhyme and are incredibly dire or try to be modern but the poet has no ear for metre and rythm and the result trippeth not off the tongue.
Our approach is to identify good poets that seem to appeal to our open mike listeners and then nurture them before finally making sure they have a really well made book that can retail around £6.50 to £8 and pay for the printing. This model works well and all our books have been sucessful - even to the point that we're doing reprints.
I'll return to pricing in another blog in a week or two.