How Poets Get Social Media Wrong - and how they can get it right
How to build an effective poetic presence on social media
You have finally had your poems published, they are in journals, they are online, maybe you have reached the hallowed grounds of pamphlet or collection publishing. Congratulations! You’re a published poet! You wait for the explosion of interest in your work to come, the book sales, the invitations to events and readings and festivals and….. nothing happens. What’s gone wrong? No one can see you.
With the best will in the world, poetry is a niche market full of many and varied poets vying for attention. It is saturated. If you are lucky enough to get your work noticed by a publisher (yay!) you cannot rely on them to promote your work (Boo!). Most poetry publishers are small scale and independent without the funds to promote their writers to any great degree. In my previous post on choosing a publisher I talked a little bit about this, and about looking for publishers that DO help you promote your work and help you to find opportunities to do so:
Submitting Your Pamphlet Collection - How to Choose a Publisher
You’ve had a few poems published in magazines, maybe even won or placed in a competition or two. You have fifteen to twenty poems burning a whole in your pocket and are ready to move to the next stage - pamphlet submission. But lo, the market is saturated with small indie publshers of poetry, alongside the big hitting names and pamphlet competitions. You know that your work will be held up during the submissions process, so how do you choose who you send your precious, hard won words too? I have ten tips to help you get there…
We live in a digital age, and there is no getting around it. That doesn’t mean that you don’t have choices as a poet in how you present yourself to the world, it just means that most of the people who might want to find more about you and your work will be looking on social media to do so.
If you are not used to social media, if you don’t have a big following, it is daunting to try and create space for yourself. In the following post I will go through some basics that will help you to work out what’s right for you, what strategies to use and what mistakes (that I see repeatedly being made by poets) to avoid.