How to earn from poetry

For a very long period of time, I believed that one cannot earn from poetry for a number of reasons. First, publishing companies are no longer interested in publishing poetry books. Why? This is because there are a few people who buy them.



To understand what I mean let me ask you a question. How many poetry books have you bought this year? If you have bought two or more congratulation. If you have not bought any book, then you can understand that many others are not buying poetry books.

People now read poetry online. Publishing houses now concentrate on publishing academic books.

A few companies that publish poetry books, will ask you to pay half-down or more of the publishing cost. And how many of us can do that?

With these statistics, only a few dedicated poets keep on writing poetry because they enjoy doing it. However, we always want to see our work published by a reputable company.

Have I sounded too pessimistic? I am writing from experience. I have interacted with so many writers' organisations at a very high level. I worked with the Zimbabwe Budding Writers Association for more than a decade. What did we achieve?

With the Zimbabwe Budding Writers' Association, I managed to have my poems flighted on our national broadcast station, Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation. A number of poetry anthologies were produced, but only in our local languages, as a way of promoting our culture.

These days a few poetry anthologies that are produced are collective ones- ten or more poets compiling their poems into a book. However, your poetry book can be published if you pay the cost of publication or if you self-publish.

Web publication

With the difficulties faced by poets, it is easier to see your poems online and be read by many people. However, online poems are not edited by specialists. You publish them as you wish.

Recommendation

The best way to get your poems published is to form a group. You contribute your poems to an anthology and publish it. You can put your funds together and pay for the publication costs. You can do this with a reputable company. For me, this is the way to go with poetry.

In order to achieve that we need poetry groups, such as Facebook ones, where we organise ourselves.


How to earn from your poems?

This sounds contradictory from what I wrote above. Yes, you can earn from your poems. However, to earn you need to be a large group of poets. You can join, online blogging sites that allow you to publish poems. An example of a website that pays you for publishing your poems is Steemit.

But just posting your poems on steemit will not result in earning some money. At Steemit, you can only earn when other people have liked your poems and have commented positively on your poems.

So you need to have a large group of poets to upvote your poems and comment on them. The only way is through having many poets to join it. It is important to know each other's links so you are upvoted and earn.

Steemit is not the only ones. There are others such as Weku. To get more information on how to earn from poetry, join our Facebook or telegram group:

Facebook: African Writers'  Bureau

Telegram: African Writers'  Bureau

We have other partnership schemes to discuss in these groups that allow you to earn from your poetry.














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