Thursday, May 26, 2005

Speaking of chapbooks, yesterday I recieved the new copies of The Archaeologist's Daughter sans the printing goof. While I was completely happy with them title page mistake and all, they decided to rerun them, so I have 80 odd books with one set of page numberings and a missing title page, and another 100 with the correction. I'm making out like a bandit I suppose.

It's funny though that poems are now facing entirely different poems than they were in the first printing, which when reading it, makes the experience slightly different. Funny how that's something we take for granted in printed books and journals, but doesn't come into play in online media, how one poem plays off another, what role the facing page has on the reading experience of the other page. In the latest issue of ACM, my poem is opposed by some very snazzy artwork, which made me very happy for some reason and was perfect.

As for the chapbook debacle, which is still raging it seems, there was also a comment about how chapbooks don't sell outside a coterie, that poetry doesn't sell, hmm...I've sold four chapbooks (mine ) to people I don't even know in the last couple of days via the website. Not the usual sales figures, which is maybe one a week, but not wholly unheard of. I average about one dgp chapbook by one of our authors a week, not counting the initial publication surge. In early March, there was a huge demand for Wicked Alice print annuals, who knows why. I tend to buy alot of micropress books (short and long) via paypal when I can And so do alot of people I know. So, in the poetry world (and the poetry world is actually pretty huge despite what some would argue) poetry sells. And maybe that's enough...

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