I find this sort of thing to be rather interesting because we’re often told that the Internet and social media have “leveled the playing field” so to speak between the big cheeses and the “little guys”. Fascinating!

It seems in this case, the big cheese won.

A Summary Of Big And Small
I usually hear about the battle between David and Goliath in business circles where I spend a great deal of time as a small business marketer. But I’m going to steer this discussion in the direction of the author-editor-publisher troika.

I believe I have some unique insight here because I fall into all of the above categories. I own my business and have people working for me, which makes me somewhat of a big cheese. Yet, my business is small enough to be considered a small business so I’m still a little guy. In the literary world I am an author, an editor, and a publisher. So I’ve got all the bases covered.

But this isn’t about me. It’s about power.

Here’s the question: Has the Internet truly leveled the power structure between the “haves” and the “have nots” or has it simply provided opportunities to succeed and to fail that before were not available to people at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale?

You should probably read that question two or three times and let it sink in. I believe if you ask a question the right way then you can get any answer you want. So I’ve specifically worded this question to ask it in such a way that it might shed some light on what’s really going on in this newfangled techno-revolution.

But I’m going to try and apply the answer to the publishing field and see where it gets us.

My Response As An Author
I see the world through multiple lenses. Sometimes those lenses are at odds with one another and I must find some way to reconcile them. Such is the case with my literary aspirations.

As an author, I’m excited about the unique opportunities the Internet affords. But there are just as many pitfalls as there are opportunities. It isn’t all a bed of roses.

Before the Internet, before newsrooms and forums, and even before e-mail, if an author disagreed with a review, she could just send a private letter to the reviewer or pick up the phone and call the reviewer and give that reviewer a piece of her mind. No one had to know. I’m not saying that’s what one should have done, but an author could have done just that and no one would have known. Or likely cared.

Today, the temptation to respond to something someone writes online is so great that an author can embarrass herself before she comes to her senses. And everyone will know it.

That’s a pitfall. But it isn’t the only one.

Many authors are so excited about the opportunity to self-publish that they hasten themselves to do so long before they are ready. They could be hurting their careers before they get them off the ground. That’s another pitfall.

These pitfalls don’t diminish the opportunities or the rewards for success. But any author who is considering doing it all themselves should take note of them. Calculate the risks or they could get you in the end.

My Response As An Editor
An editor’s job is to give a work the best presentation possible in order to make the experience a great one for the reader. Too many authors do not understand the editor’s role.

Editors are people so we are prone to mistakes, errors, and bad judgment just like the rest of you. But a good editor can make a mediocre writer look outstanding. Trust me, I’ve made many a small town news reporter look much better than they actually were on paper. It’s not hard if you’re any good at editing.

As an editor, however, I’ve seen good writers make fatal mistakes that a little restraint could have saved them from making. I’ve made my fair share for sure.

Reviewers, too, have their challenges. It isn’t easy to read someone else’s work and pull out the good, separate it from the bad, and communicate one’s findings to an audience that may or may not give a damn. I am fortunate in that no one I have reviewed for World Class Poetry book reviews has responded to me in the manner that Alice Hoffman did to her reviewer. And I’ve said some pretty nasty things about some of those books – by independent authors nonetheless. The bright spot has been that some of them have thanked me for taking the time to read their work and comment on it. That shows a level of professionalism that can be admired.

So as an editor, when I see someone act publicly in the manner that Alice Hoffman has, it frustrates me. There really is no excuse.

My Response As A Publisher
My response as a publisher is much more bleak. But it really is from an author’s perspective as much as from a publisher’s.

When you take on the roll of publisher, you are assuming responsibility for all aspects of the publishing process, from selection of material to editing to printing, copyrighting, marketing, and distribution. You accept the failures and the successes for all of it. Period.

In all likelihood, you will not be good at all of it. I see too many self-published authors who are just downright awful at editing their own work. I have fallen prey to this myself. While I consider myself a good editor of other’s, I am no good at editing my own. And that’s a terrible tragedy.

By the same token, many authors are lousy at marketing. They could be great editors, but if you can’t market your book then what difference does it make? Your book won’t sell.

Many self-published authors have no problem outsourcing the printing of their book, but when it comes to handling the rest of the publishing process, they want to do it all themselves. And they fail miserably. No wonder. They’ve got bad judgment.

Bad judgment comes in many flavors. As a publisher, you can exercise bad judgment in your selection of authors, or more specifically in the selection of a particular project. As an editor, you can exercise bad judgment in the layout and design of a book. As an author, you can exercise bad judgment in any number of ways (choice of words, choice of editors, choice of publishers, subject matter, et. al.). And marketing. Who is responsible for that?

Well, honestly, everyone is responsible for marketing. Many authors who opt for traditional publishing think that just because they have the name of a big publisher behind them that their job is done. When the marketing fails, it’s time to complain. But ask them if they gave any readings, sent out any press releases, or hired a publicist and the answer is almost always “No.”

Fail!

If you are a working author then you have to take responsibility for your own success, whether you do it all yourself or publish through a large publishing house. If you want to succeed, you’ve got to learn how to market yourself. And that requires more than a strategy based on hope.

It’s hard being a publisher. You have risks. Financial risks, legal risks, editorial risks, just to name a few. The risks don’t change if you are a self-publisher. Their magnitude may change, but at the heart of it all is risk. Real risks. And I’m talking more than the risk you took to expose your innermost, darkest secrets. Those are minimal compared to the risk that your publisher is taking on you.

The competition is stiff. Consumers are fickle. Production costs are rising. The budget is tight. Those assholes in Congress are in session again. Someone put chocolate in someone else’s peanut butter.

You get the picture. There’s always a reason (or an excuse) to fail. Do it yourself and you have no one to blame.

The Most Important Part Of The Publishing Process
You have your strengths. I have mine. Quasimodo has his. And they are all quite different, yes?

Yes.

My strength is editing, though admittedly I am lousy at editing my own work. I’m a not-so-bad writer. A better than average poet. Good at certain aspects of marketing, and getting better. And the verdict is still out on my skill as a publisher. I’m banking on adequate. If not profitable.

But this isn’t about tooting my horn. It’s about knowing thyself and to thine own self being true (thanks, Shakey).

Do you know your strengths? Your weaknesses? Your biases?

I’m surprised at how many authors enter into self-publishing without taking personal inventory and counting the costs. Were you aware that marketing is the most important aspect of the publishing process? It isn’t the writing. No one cares how good a writer you are until they’ve bought your book. But for that to happen, someone has to “sell” it. It has to be marketed. Are you any good at marketing?

As mentioned before, too many authors are willing to outsource the printing, but not much else. Why? You should outsource every part of the process that you aren’t any good at. You know why? Because your success is at stake. And as a publisher you’ve got to make good decisions. That means hiring the best person for the job.

This is why most self-published authors don’t get very far. I wrote a blog post in March in which I discussed the vanity of self-publishing online. Several readers took me to task on my stance, which I expected. But the majority of the comments were made due to a misunderstanding of my intent. That was likely my fault for not communicating clearly about the subject matter. I can take those hits.

But what I can’t take is an author who fails and blames it on someone else. I don’t think for a minute that Alice Hoffman’s apology is all that sincere. When an author list’s a reviewer’s phone number and asks her readers to

“Tell her what u think of snarky critics.”

it indicates to me that the author clearly thought that such a request would be honored and vindicate her by popular opinion. It stems from the misconception that the Internet has “leveled the playing field”. Such moves are done as a power play. In this case, it backfired.

Lousy marketing.

Hoffman took a calculated risk and failed. So own up to it. The fact that she deleted her Twitter account seems to imply that her embarrassment runs deeper than a mere publisher’s statement. It likely means that she was ordered to remove it by her publisher or she has realized that she does not know how to use social media and removed it for fear of retaliation, or some other concern. I’m not trying to crawl into Hoffman’s head, but I know that she now is a liability to her publisher and that her publisher would be right in having concerns about Hoffman’s future marketability.

Marketing is the most important part of the publishing process. Do it right, do it wrong, or not at all. The payoff is a sonofabitch for somebody.

Why You Should Think Twice About Publishing Your Own Book
Hoffman’s faux pas is not unique. For every successful author or artist doing it all themselves (and there are some) there are 10 Alice Hoffmans with heads planted firmly up asses.

Hoffman’s response to a critic could have been made by anyone – even a self-published author. But it gets media attention because Hoffman has achieved a certain level of success in the past. However, future success is not dependent on the past. It is dependent on the present.

Do you know how to use the marketing tools at your disposal? Do you know how to conduct a feasibility study or find the audience for your book? How about social media marketing or search engine optimization? Understand how it’s done?

This blog achieved high traffic and high search engine rankings within six months with hardly any marketing simply because of my skill in search engine optimization. But readers have continued to come back because I can write with their interests in mind (or at least with enough fisticuffs to keep their voyeuristic eye open). In the past eight months I have written less often, but my rankings are still present at the search engines and while my traffic has declined somewhat my subscriptions are going up.

Again, I’m not tooting my horn for ego’s sake. I have made certain editorial decisions that have contributed to this blog’s success. Some of those have to do with my “snarkiness”, a quality not appreciated by everyone. My sarcasm on this blog is partly due to temperament and partly due to a marketing “concept” to make myself unique. It works. People read it and respond to it, sometimes negatively. Boo hoo.

At some point in your life as a publisher, you’ll have to make decisions that, as an author, you’ll simply hate. If you don’t make them then you won’t succeed, either as an author or a publisher. In a word, you’ve got to exercise good judgment.

Many writers don’t have good judgment when it comes to editing or publishing. It comes from knowing your strengths. Simply being in control of your works of art is not a benefit. You decide to self-publish because you hope to profit from your writing. Otherwise, why would you shell out the expense? Printing isn’t cheap. And controlling too much can mean putting the stranglehold of death upon your talents.

To bring a long story to a quick halt, the most important quality for an author, an editor, or a publisher is good judgment. And that judgment manifests in different ways depending on the hat you are wearing. But if you don’t have good judgment in matters of publishing then you should fire your publisher and find a new one. Because bad judgment is a killer and the last thing you want left in the morgue is your writing career.

In summary, publishing is a business. Even if you self-publish, you’ve got to impress your editor and your publisher with a product that can sell. Do your editor and publisher have the skills to know what readers will buy?

The hard part is the marketing. If you aren’t prepared to handle the marketing part of your book, even a self-published poetry book, then you shouldn’t be publishing. It’s your money, but publishing a book without intent to earn a profit on it just because you think it’s good is sheer vanity. Throwing a blog up with all of your poems on it as a free buffet isn’t publishing. It’s giving away your rare jewels (if the poetry is any good). If it isn’t any good then you’re just giving away pebble stones.

An author thinks about creation. An editor thinks about packaging. A publisher thinks about marketing. You’d better be able to do all three or you’ll never survive.

Why? Because print papers are dying. Meanwhile, online distribution is growing. What’s 2+2?

Well, literature is pretty much moving in the same direction, only slower.

I don’t think paper literature will ever die. There will still be newspapers in print. There are still radio programs that deliver the news, right? Old systems don’t just die off. They find their niche and hold on. So too do I think print editions of poetry will stick around even as the masses move to online delivery of a dying lit.

It’s already happening. How many poetry blogs are there? They’ve become sort of a cliche, a bit like family memoirs. The only people who care enough to read them are distant cousins. But the good ones really stand out. And it’s just a matter of time before a real literary “blockbuster” takes off in the digital world. There have been a few successes, but nothing yet really stands out as a true blockbuster in the NYT best seller sense. But I see it coming.

What do you see as the future of publishing for poetry and literature? Is there a new Gutenberg on the horizon?

1. The Vanity Blog – For lack of a better term, I’ll call the first category of poetry blog a “vanity blog”. The reason I call it a vanity blog is because the owner, the poet, simply uses the blog to post their own poems and they are not really much concerned with anything else. Vanity publishing has taken a new face from what it was a few years ago – it’s moved online and exists in two forms (digital and print self-publishing through services like AuthorHouse and Xlibris; and self-publishing through a blog). The second form of vanity publishing is the easiest and least costly. Many of these blogs are run for free because the blogger uses one of the free hosts like Blogger.com or WordPress.com, therefore there are no expenses involved (though I have seen one instance where the poet used Google AdWords to promote his blog and obtain new readers). Simply put, most of the vanity blogs exist solely for the poet’s own vanity. The poems are not that good and the readership is limited. However, there are a few poetry vanity blogs where the poems are not that bad, but I will leave that to your judgement.
2. The Marketing Blog – The second type of blog that you’ll find is what I call the marketing blog. These blogs are usually maintained by individual poets, journals and publications, and other poetry organizations. The purpose of these blogs is to promote the works of the poets, events of an organization, or to discuss issues related to a particular journal (such as contests, promotion of the poets published in the journal, deadlines, new issues, etc.). Some of the marketing blogs that I’d recommend are:
   • The Kenyon Review Blog
   • Harriet
   • Blogalicious
   • 32Poems
   • One Poet’s Notes
   • Poetic Asides
   • World Class Poetry
3. The Poetry Journal Blog – Some blogs act like poetry journals. That is, they have submission guidelines and accept poetry submissions from the general public then they publish the ones they like. Some noteworthy poetry journal blogs include:
   1. The New Verse News
   2. I’d love to hear other blogs that are poetry or literary journals
4. Poetry News – Another type of poetry blog you’ll find online is the blog that promotes poetry in general and that acts as a news resource for poets, delivering upcoming contests, new poetry journal announcements, etc. Here are a few poetry resource blogs I’d recommend:
   1. DIY Publishing
   2. NewPages
   3. Poetry Hound
   4. Poetry Hut
5. Philosophy Blogs – The last type of poetry blog you’ll find online is what I call a philosophical blog. Its primary purpose is to advance a particular philosophy of poetics or to discuss poetics in general. There aren’t as many of these types of blogs online as I’d like to see, but there are a few, including World Class Poetry Blog, and in addition to WCP I’d recommend these:
   1. Silliman’s Blog
   2. Lemon Hound
   3. William Watkins

I’m sure there are blogs that I’m leaving out in each category. I’d like it if you posted your own favorite blogs in each of these categories. We could add one other category – the Hybrid Blog – but I’m afraid that would be a huge list. The Hybrid Poetry Blog is one that could fall into more than one category above, such as the World Class Poetry Blog, which exists partly to discuss poetics in general and partly to market myself as a poet and my own works, including the sister site World Class Poetry (practically speaking, however, its purpose is primarily philosophical and secondarily marketing). Other blogs, such as Poetic Asides, serve similar functions.

I hope you find additional blogs to read here in this list and while I realize it’s a rather short list of mostly popular blogs that you’re likely already familiar with, I’d hope the benefit is to help us see how we can use blogging as a tool to further the cause of poetry. By categorizing the types of blogs currently online we may form new categories or expand upon the categories we now have. I’d like to see more poetry journals as blogs and more discussions of poetics taking place on blogs. Any takers?

Dear Allen,

We’re passing on these, Allen. But not without praise. We very much enjoyed reading your work, will always welcome it here, whenever you take a notion to send it. The rejection has more to do with the huge number of quality submissions we’re receiving than anything else.

That last line is perhaps one of the most common reasons for rejection if a poem is on the mark. It tells me that I submitted the right poems to the right place. It also tells me that those poems are worthy of publication and that I should send them out to another journal immediately, which I will do.

I hope the journals that I receive rejection notices from don’t mind me publishing them. Technically, they own the copyrights to their rejections and I should ask for permission before publishing them. I don’t because I don’t really want to wait a week or two, or longer, to get a “yes”. By then, the spirit of the moment will have passed and it won’t be the same, so I make an assumption. Also, If I do get a “yes” I’d almost feel obligated to print the editor’s name or the name of the journal and I think that would be bad form and possibly open doors for future embarrassment. I wouldn’t want to do that to an editor and possibly burn a bridge, but I do believe that publishing rejection notices can be an encouragement to others and that’s why I like to do it. It says that near success is possible, and if near success is possible then full success is equally possible. It’s just another step up the ladder.

Rejection is something I don’t get enough of. That is because I don’t send out enough submissions. I tend to spend a lot of time writing and revising, honing the craft. The few submissions that I do send out tend to be after a lot of living with and sleeping with the words that I birth. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not.

At any rate, it’s been a hell of a day. We celebrated my youngest grandson’s birthday. It was a lot of fun, yet, somehow, I feel like shedding tears. Not because of the rejections. Just because.

Meet the poet laureate of Poetic Asides, Sara Diane Doyle.

Billy Childish, 3 poetry books published in one month.

How to change the world with a poem.

Naomi Shihab Nye says “Losing Bedrock Farm” is the perfect poem.

A fight between the literati ensues:

I’m disturbed by the notion of lit mags as “a preserve for the elite.” For one thing, that seems like the last place finisher who says he never really wanted to win anyway. It’s easy to justify your lack of success by saying you have smaller ambitions, but that just sounds like an excuse for mediocrity to me. But even if you’re going to set small goals, why make that goal “a preserve for the elite”? A preserve is just this side of a zoo, if you ask me, and I’d rather not accept my cage quite yet, if it’s all right with you. I’d rather run wild a bit longer with the people who prefer not to think of themselves as “the elite.” That’s too sanctimonious, too self-satisfied for my tastes. Elitists tend to like things the way they are. I’d prefer writers who have the power to imagine the world better than it is and the determination to use their talents and sweat to get even an inch closer to that ideal.

I agree with Ted Genoways on both points: Journalism is suited to any medium willing to put in the hours and the sweat necessary to produce great reportage; and secondly, lit mags are not a “preserve for the elite”. Howard Junker is wrong. Lit mags should engage the culture, not look down their noses at it. And if you give a shit, read the rest of Genoways’ post.

As a former local newspaper editor, I’d have to agree with John Hewitt on the fate of newspapers.

Diane Lockward recommends these Letters to the World.

It pays to be the world’s worst poet.

On writing German haiku.

Jilly Dybka publishes Trouble and Honey.

Poetry publishing basics for beginners.

A scrap of paper wins the contest.

Defending criticism.

Should poets write poems about poems?