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Poetry isn’t Dead, it’s DIY
Hopeful for hopeless poets?
In Amazon’s Motivational & Inspirational Poetry category, 9 of the top 10 books are self-published. Isn’t that crazy?
In the Love Poems category, that number falls to 4 out of 10. In Written By Women, 3 out of 10. It still feels significant to me. These rankings are based on sales and updated frequently. It got me thinking, and then it got me writing… so here we are.
Getting a book sold is hard enough when you have a big publishing name and editorial and marketing team behind you, so how is it that authors without all that are hitting high sales? What drives authors to try it? Has traditional publishing gotten harder? Has self-publishing gotten easier?
Traditional publishing
When my little collection of poetry started feeling like a book project, I started looking at publishing options. Traditional publishing is hard for every genre. Big publishing houses require that you submit through an agent, and it depends on each agent, but book proposals have gotten more and more complicated. You’re not just submitting a manuscript. You need to submit an edited manuscript, summarize chapter by chapter, identify the target audience, list a few books that are similar to your book… the list is long.
