The world is small
星期一 十一月 19, 2007 10:34 pm
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心情: Happy ]
心情: Happy ]Tonight we as a poet group went to see a publisher, Howard. Howard kindly showed us the whole process. Most of Canadian publishers do not accept unsolicited submission. But he still does. He admitted it was hard because it took his business much time and labors to go through thousands of manuscripts.
The sad news is that we realize the market for poetry was very tough.
Even for famous poets, if their poetry books sell more than 300, it is good enough.
Most big publishers even do not consider poetry on their publishing list.
So for many poets, self-publish seems much easy and reasonable.
We asked a lot of questions and Howard provided a lot of helpful information. He also read some survey for book selling. Online book stores sell 52% of book items. The entire new tech brought opportunity yet also big challenge.
In the end, I showed Howard my chapbook which I designed. It revealed that we had common friend. Terry was his student before. And this summer Terry tried to introduce me to him and hoped him to give me some advice. Terry showed me where his house was, by hoping he came back from Paris. But by that time he wasn’t back. Now tonight we met at his business. Such a small world! Howard gave us each 10 books as gifts. He even suggested us to come as a group to pre-read manuscripts submitted to his company and share our opinion of worthy publishing or not. So we could participate in the real publishing process.
