Creative ways to market poetry

Yesterday FSG sent out a notice about their poetry blog for National Poetry Month (yes, that would be April).  I have to admit that the bulk of the poetry I’ve read was consumed under duress in AP French Lit, but then I remembered that FSG was one of the first (the first?) publishing house to blog about books, so I gave it a whirl.  I have to say, they’re featuring some of the most creative giveaways/downloads I’ve seen offered for poetry (or really, for books in general):

• An all new couplet composed by Robert Pinsky and available for download as your ringtone
• A whole week devoted to poetry in translation, with posts from many of FSG’s award-winning translators
• More original audio recorded exclusively for the blog by Frank Bidart, Les Murray, August Kleinzahler, Yusef Komunyakaa, and more
• Free, downloadable broadsheets appropriate for brightening up even the most boring cubicle

I might have to become a poetry fan …

Migrating personal email accounts to Gmail

LifeHacker tends to be a little advanced even for a pretty techy person like me, but this post about importing email into a Gmail account caught my attention.  For those who do not have “work” email accounts — like many authors and freelancers — Gmail has several benefits including the ability to set email signatures and out-of-office messages.  (In comparison, AOL, for example, doesn’t even include the initial email in a response and without a message trail, you never know what the “Yes, that’s great” response refers to.  Personally, it drives me nuts since I then have to look up my original message when I could otherwise be spending my time, say, blogging.)  Anyway, if any authors or freelancers with whom you work are thinking about making the jump to Gmail, they will probably want to check out this post.

Morning Brief — April 1, 2008

No April Fool’s jokes from moi today, so I’ll just jump right in.

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Kassia Krozser of Booksquare pointed out an interesting piece on Medialoper that talked about maintaining contact lists.  More specifically, the post noted that many writers (and musicians, artists, etc.) have built large fan bases on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.  What if those sites disappeared?  For authors very dependent on their social networking “friends,” they may want to encourage those fans to additionally sign up for mailing lists / newsletters so they have fans’ contact information should the networking sites ever go kaput.

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TechCrunch posted a piece yesterday about traffic on blogs versus traditional media sites.  The writer, Erick Schonfeld, brings up an interesting point, which is that the blogs with the highest traffic, like TechCrunch or CNET.com, have professional staffs, while traditional media sites that have the highest traffic, like the New York Times, have very active blogging staffs — in other words, the sites with the most traffic are really a mix of the old and new worlds.

This raises another issue which is that not all blogs are the same — many blogs are like this one, with one person writing posts.  (This applies to pretty much all the literary blogs.)  Other blogs — often those in the technology and political spheres — like CNET.com or the Huffington Post, are pretty big enterprises, some with with dozens on staff.  Naturally, this will affect how you build a relationship with and pitch a blog / blogger.

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FishBowlNY reports that the editor behind Blackbook will launch a new magazine this fall called Tar.  You can check here for details, although it doesn’t actually say what the magazine is about although it will be glossy, expensive ($20) and eco-friendly …