Writing poetry has never been extolled as a professional profession. Compared to the 9 to 5 job, sitting at your desk writing poetry is a part of the artiste lifestyle that doesn’t exactly get the recognition it deserves.
But for those whose dream job it is to sit at a desk and write all day, then poetry is one way they can get the job done .
Publishing on the Web
The world-wide web is another place poets, who want recognition for their work can submit to.
According to Jessica Powers author of The Confessional (Knopf, 2007) in her web article, “Now You Read it, Now you Don’t: A Cautionary Look at Online Magazines”, writers who choose to publish their work online face a whole host of potential pitfalls.
Online publishing can have a short life span – published pieces can be easily taken off by editors or websites could be dismantled. Whereas books can be archived, online magazines don’t have an easy retrieval system. Your piece could be published and then the next thing you know it, it's gone.
There’s also the risk of having your work plagiarized. With the world-wide web, you can get fast and easy information with a drop of a hat.
But that doesn’t mean that publishing on the web makes you more prone to having your material plagiarized. Far from it. People could scan a story in a matter of seconds. Remembering that plagiarism isn’t something you can control is important. If anything having the online medium makes tracking intellectual property easier. With search engines and Google alerts, it’s harder these days to go about stealing people’s work.
Writing for the web
Although it might not seem like it publishing online has the same credibility as publishing in print, writing for the web is a different platform altogether. When submitting work, you might first want to consider what pieces are more appropriate for the online forum. You might want to consider if you want this piece from people from other countries like Kenya or India to see this, or if the piece is quick and quirky enough for the web.
According to Jessica Powers, “writers should let go of the assumption that print publications are ‘better’ or give a writer more ‘credibility.’”
More and more online publications are becoming eligible for prize anthology collections and earning the recognition that used to be saved for print media.
The Other Side of Web Publishing
Sites like Poetry.com are scamming people of their money, promising in a letter how their work will be published in a big anthology and staged in a huge poetry presentation. It’s enough to keep anyone who’s a poetry lover from blushing. But the thing is everyone, and that is everyone who submits a poem gets such a letter, exalting on the high quality of the poem and the expertise of the poet.
Such sites give publishing online a bad name. You’d just have to play it smart and avoid such frivolous sites and in the long end this will make your publishing online life much saner.
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