Dear Reader,
Forgive this unsolicited ‘promotional’ email. I’m attempting to promote poetry and Lapwing Poetry in particular on-line because of a declining bricks & mortar (bookshops) marketplace especially for poetry in our general society. On-line publication and reselling may have reached a degree of levelling out in some countries and growth in others, poetry has its own little niche in most societies. The contemporary problem is one of getting poetry to people interested in poetry wheresoever they may be and to penetrate the dominant popular fiction and mass media market. Notice the use of verse in several recent television advertising campaigns in the UK!
To go beyond conventional outlets for poetry we make the following offer, get to read and keep forever, five different PDF titles for a donation of £5.0.
From our on-line listing at lapwingpoetry.com, chose any 5 titles in PDF format and email your choice to lapwing.poetry@ntlworld.com.
These PDF copies are printable, either as single pages or in their entirety, they are permanently in the your possession. In this way, the reader has easy access to new poetry and even short prose such as Martin Domleo’s ‘The Rest is Silence: the making of Shakespeare’s book’ or Gerry McDonnell’s bildungsroman ‘Martin Incidentally’.
It is a good way to ‘sample’ new writing before opting to buy a hard copy at some future date.
How it works: having made your choice from the Lapwing listing and emailed your list of the five titles chosen to
lapwing.poetry@ntlworld.com, they will then be sent by return email to you as PDF attachments followed by a PayPal Request for the donation.
The simple fact is that poetry publication is non-commercial and very few poetry books get into the shops. There are now around only 900 bookshops in the UK and Ireland and declining, down from around 4000 a few years back, this includes the book-chainstores – Waterstones etc., and independents like Jaffa & Neale.
Some of these shops are ‘survivors’, some are specialists, some a mix of newsagents, stationers and confectioners. Poetry just doesn’t feature in most customers’ buying patterns and it is a slow seller, an important
decision making element in any shopkeeper’s offering to the public.
Poetry publication is about 0.01% of the UK and Irish publishing industry with an uptake of only about 20% of that hundredth of 1% per cent.
Obviously, a computer screen hasn’t the same ‘feel’ as a paper book yet poetry in whatever shape or form is essential to our cultural health and well-being as well as to our cultural identities. It is essential for those and other reasons that we do all we can to provide the poetry reading public with contemporary poetry and fine literature. Poetry reading is in many ways a secular spiritual activity.
Inevitably the poets’ presentation and even interpretation of their own literary, socio-political, cultural, philosophical and spiritual experiences in poetry are a shared part of their intimate being. That is something
which, as readers, we often cherish and can find in poetry, echoes of our own and often unheard ‘small voice’.
If you can, do pass on this plea for poetry to your own ‘community of interest’.
Yours sincerely,
Dennis Greig
Lapwing Publications
Forgive this unsolicited ‘promotional’ email. I’m attempting to promote poetry and Lapwing Poetry in particular on-line because of a declining bricks & mortar (bookshops) marketplace especially for poetry in our general society. On-line publication and reselling may have reached a degree of levelling out in some countries and growth in others, poetry has its own little niche in most societies. The contemporary problem is one of getting poetry to people interested in poetry wheresoever they may be and to penetrate the dominant popular fiction and mass media market. Notice the use of verse in several recent television advertising campaigns in the UK!
To go beyond conventional outlets for poetry we make the following offer, get to read and keep forever, five different PDF titles for a donation of £5.0.
From our on-line listing at lapwingpoetry.com, chose any 5 titles in PDF format and email your choice to lapwing.poetry@ntlworld.com.
These PDF copies are printable, either as single pages or in their entirety, they are permanently in the your possession. In this way, the reader has easy access to new poetry and even short prose such as Martin Domleo’s ‘The Rest is Silence: the making of Shakespeare’s book’ or Gerry McDonnell’s bildungsroman ‘Martin Incidentally’.
It is a good way to ‘sample’ new writing before opting to buy a hard copy at some future date.
How it works: having made your choice from the Lapwing listing and emailed your list of the five titles chosen to
lapwing.poetry@ntlworld.com, they will then be sent by return email to you as PDF attachments followed by a PayPal Request for the donation.
The simple fact is that poetry publication is non-commercial and very few poetry books get into the shops. There are now around only 900 bookshops in the UK and Ireland and declining, down from around 4000 a few years back, this includes the book-chainstores – Waterstones etc., and independents like Jaffa & Neale.
Some of these shops are ‘survivors’, some are specialists, some a mix of newsagents, stationers and confectioners. Poetry just doesn’t feature in most customers’ buying patterns and it is a slow seller, an important
decision making element in any shopkeeper’s offering to the public.
Poetry publication is about 0.01% of the UK and Irish publishing industry with an uptake of only about 20% of that hundredth of 1% per cent.
Obviously, a computer screen hasn’t the same ‘feel’ as a paper book yet poetry in whatever shape or form is essential to our cultural health and well-being as well as to our cultural identities. It is essential for those and other reasons that we do all we can to provide the poetry reading public with contemporary poetry and fine literature. Poetry reading is in many ways a secular spiritual activity.
Inevitably the poets’ presentation and even interpretation of their own literary, socio-political, cultural, philosophical and spiritual experiences in poetry are a shared part of their intimate being. That is something
which, as readers, we often cherish and can find in poetry, echoes of our own and often unheard ‘small voice’.
If you can, do pass on this plea for poetry to your own ‘community of interest’.
Yours sincerely,
Dennis Greig
Lapwing Publications
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