Poets' Web Sites

www.stephenmorrissey.ca

Even fairly recently I was asked about the importance of poets having webs sites. A poet's site is a business card. A site won't make you famous and it probably won't sell your books, it probably won't get many visitors, but it will PR you to some extent. And you can make the site more interesting by adding content that would otherwise not reach a wider audience. You don't need a large audience for your site, but you need the right audience. A site will help you make connections and increase your involvement with other poets.

    People buy books online from companies like Amazon.com. I doubt many poet's sites actually sell any books. Some poets PR their latest books on their sites, but how effective is this for selling books? As someone said to me, "if a million spam E-mails can bring in a few hundred orders, you will need maybe a thousand visitors a day to your site to sell only a few books, if any." Sixty or seventy visitors a day to a poetry site is pretty good, but it won't sell books. Poetry isn't a big seller at the best of times and your site isn't likely to change this. 

    Until I'm proved wrong, I'll continue believing that poets' sites aren't an effective means to sell poetry books. Some poets have beautiful web sites, they are beautiful business cards but still worth the effort; maybe that online business card will put you into contact with someone who interests you or who is interested in your work, or that you are interested in. A poet's website is also a portal into a poet's work; either the beautiful business card model or a comprehensive portal to a poet's body of work, a poet's website might generate some interest in a poet's work but I doubt it will sell many books if that's what you want. Why does a poet's website not sell books? Because you are trying to sell something that has very limited or no interest to most people.

    This leaves a poet's site as both PR and educational outreach. What is effective, or interesting content, for a poet's site? My own feeling is that I want to put everything I've written regarding poetry online. Most of what we write reaches a small audience at best, so why not recycle this content onto our sites? The internet is a voracious publisher of content. I think of Allen Ginsberg's Deliberate Prose, Selected Essays 1952 - 1995 (New York, Perennial, 2000) as a model for what can be put online. Ginsberg's book is a collection of essays, short prose pieces, letters, odds and ends, and notes. Put some money aside in your will to keep your site online for as long as possible, sometimes a poet's work will become popular post mortem, but don't count on it.

    I recommend Bill Knott's blog which is apparently the complete Bill Knott body of work, or something approaching it. Artie Gold gave me Knott's Nights of Naomi (Plus 2 Songs) (The Barn Dream Press, Massachusetts, 1971) back in the mid-1970s. It wasn't until the 1990s that I found Knott's Other Strangers Than Our Own, Selected Love Poems. Now, online, you can find Bill Knott's body of work. Of course, Knott retains his copyright, but anyone can access the work online. He's even presented his work so it can be printed in book form. Good for Bill Knott!

Note written in July 2023: I found this 2008 post that I had taken offline, I don't remember why I took it offline. But now I see there is a comment (below) from Bill Knott, a poet whose work I like and respect. So, here it is, restored to the site. BTW, Artie gave me Bill Knott's book and then told me he was selling it to me, there you go. It was $5.00 and I'm glad I still have it. Thank you, Artie!

Bill Knott died on 12 March 2014.