An Update About Poets Unlimited
At the close of this year’s join-up period for new poets.
The last open period of 2017 for new Poets Unlimited poet-contributors has just wrapped up. Thus your humble editor/publisher is in clean-up mode getting all the new applications vetted, while still keeping the daily poetry publishing happening for our more than 60,000 readers.
A new batch of contributors comes in like a nice fresh breeze through an open window. But invariably a bunch of papers and stuff gets blown around and it takes a bit of work to clean up. Doing that now.
To those who have applied with that little form — worry not, your clicks will be processed in the next day or so. Everyone does get a note in the form of a private comment on their sample poem to let them know if they’ve been accepted. Nobody is ignored, you get a note either way.
I hasten to add that if you aren’t accepted, it isn’t like a traditional magazine where someone has judged your work not worthy of the readers, but rather it would be either that your style is more like prose than our definition of poetry (see the Contributor Guidelines item#6 about economy, imagery, and saying something beyond the words). I daresay we turn away strong writers of prose or prose-poems while accepting novice poets who create purely poetic works.
Other applicants are declined because they didn’t provide a sample poem, a user ID or otherwise didn’t fill in the form.
On the subject of statistics. Yes, we have more than 61,000 readers at the time of writing this note. Not all of them visit your poems every day. About 500 unique readers read at least one piece each day, and on average a couple of poems. That works out to almost 20,000 people-reading-minutes every month. That’d be the equivalent of 14 people reading continuously for 24hrs, or 100 people reading continuously for more than three hours.
Our readership remains solid, and our poets remain creative and prolific. Thanks for creating, and thanks for reading and sharing the stuff you like with others on your Twitter and Facebook streams.
Remember, after you’re accepted as a contributor, you need to manually submit poems. And be aware that your submitted poems might take a day or three to be published, as there is a lot of enthusiastic submitting after new poets join, so we get a bit of a backlog, beyond the maximum 25 pieces that are published each day.
We get some really great stuff up though, as new contributors share works they’ve been hoarding for a while. It’s a great period for our readers. Remember to scroll back into older poems to see the pieces not featured in the daily batch at the top of the page, as the days go by quickly. To do so, simply scroll to the bottom of the PU front page, and click the Older Poems link for an endlessly-scrollable list of all poems by publication date.
Improving
Here are a few things poets can do to improve their submissions.
- Credit: Try to ensure you give proper credit to the source/creator of the images you use. Put it in the caption under the picture. You can google-search for one of the many free stock photo sites. Remember “Google” isn’t an image credit, that’s like crediting the author of a poem by saying “the library.”
- Pic Formats: Ensure your pictures are at least 300 by 200 pixels. If you’re not very technical and don’t know how to do that — just ensure the picture isn’t really tiny when you paste it into your poem. You should also avoid transparent-background images, as they make your title disappear on the front page of the publication (!). In either case I’ll fix those problems before publishing, but it takes precious time for me to do so.
- Spacing: If you are annoyed by the wide default line-spacing when writing your poem, you might not be aware that pressing shift-return at the end of the line gives you a tighter spacing. It’s certainly not an obvious feature. Give it a try — it makes stanzas easier to read sometimes. Yes, Medium is pretty lousy at formatting options for us poets. Hope it gets better some day.
- Readings: Finally, a fun thing you can do is to include a link to yourself reading your poem. A few of you are doing that now and it’s really great to hear the poet’s own reading. Use pictures and sound if you’re good with YouTube, or try something easier like SoundCloud. Note too that Archive.org lets you upload content if you setup a free account. Tag it as poetry and share it/save it for posterity. Add a link in your PU poem submission to share your reading. (Don’t do an ‘embed’ as that can limit who can hear it.)
Again — thanks to all who contribute and read.
-Humbly yours, Ross.
