Poet Contributors:
A few notes, reminders and tips for those contributing to PoetsUnlimited — Medium’s premier poetry publication. ;)
Stats Update — You’re POPULAR!
First, let me say that we have more than (updated) 30,000 subscribers, and that our daily visits have climbed nicely recently. About 400 of those subscribers pop in each day. So while many don’t visit every day, there are about 25,000 poem-views per month, which is pretty good. That’s all because of you! (Infrequently I throw a piece in when I can find the time too :)
Improve Your Odds of Publishing
Sometimes submitted poems are declined. Not because they’re bad, but sometimes they don’t fit with our chosen style or have a non-trivial layout problem.
Have you read the Guidelines for contributors? There’s a short version too for people who are super-busy Wall Street bankers and crisis-managing diplomats. Read that one here if you’re busy.
Most Common Editing Problems
The vast majority of submissions are easy to handle (thanks for that!) — but here are a couple of occasional problem areas:
a) Too much after-poem stuff. Please avoid lots of text, widgets, paragraphs and pleas for likes (make your reader want to do click the obvious ‘like-heart’ rather than do it out of pity or obligation). Also, let your poem go free without explanations to stand on its own strength and beauty.
DO — go ahead and include a single line linking to your other blog or bio or Twitter account if you wish. Maybe you’ll gain a fan.
Sometimes there’s an interesting back-story or inspiration? Go ahead and publish your poem, then click the little Response Bubble beside the heart, below the poem. You can add some back-story there if you wish. Who knows, maybe a conversation will result with others.
The vast majority of poets have this under control — thanks for the effort!
b) Picture problems — make sure your picture is at least 200px x 300px, any smaller and the fancy front page graphics don’t work on Medium, so I’ll need to edit the picture to make it bigger.
If you use a transparent-background .png or .gif that can be a problem too as the poem title and teaser line might not show up against the background. Then I need to convert the image and stick it back in.
If that’s too technical for you — just avoid teensy tiny pics and you’ll be okay.
c) Line spacing — I don’t fix this, as I hate to mess with a poet’s chosen format of line breaks etc. And Medium really doesn’t help us much with the formatting available for poets. (Boo!)
The main line-spacing issue is when stanzas get really spread out. You probably don’t like it but don’t know that if you press “Return” you get that big paragraph space, like this:
Line one
Line two
Line three
The secret command is that if you press SHIFT-Return you get nice tight stanzas like this:
Line one
Line two
Line three
And violets are blue
That can make your poem look a bit nicer.
Anyway, that’s all for my impromptu update. Keep on poeting, poets. I enjoy the diversity of contributions and the pictures you paint with your words.
