Friday, June 24, 2011

Why a Poetry eBook?

As a fiction writer as well as a poet, I could have published a novel or short story as my first e-offering, pricing it at the popular 99 cents. I chose to publish poetry first because I care about poetry's presentation in a way few larger publishers do, including self-publishing giant Lulu. I'm not convinced e-readers will phase out books. Frankly, I hope they don't. My thinking is, as long as new media are there, poetry deserves a foothold just as prose does.

Poetry is inherently more challenging to e-publish than prose, but that's all the more reason to do it. I invite you to buy my book, We Might Have, and spread the word that, despite extra hurdles, poetry can translate well to an e-reader.

2 comments:

deshantwrites said...

Hear! Hear! or Here! Here! (Hare! Hare!?) I'm working on a collection of short stories and the layout issues I'm having our simply dumbfounding. I'm glad that your ebook translates well and the price point is enough to get curious minds a taste without feeling that they got taken if they don't immediately fall in love. You may want to look into turning your preview into an actual poem instead of the TOC though.

Gerald So said...

Thanks. I've looked into the Amazon preview. Amazon automatically takes the first ten percent of a book to use as the preview. In the case of WE MIGHT HAVE, the first ten percent is the TOC.