Publishing Perspectives by Dennis Abrams -
Poetry, as everyone well knows, doesn’t sell. But, at the New York Times, Alexandra Alter looked at a new and fascinating phenomenon: poets moving from Tumblr and on to the bestseller lists, selling hundreds of thousand of books in the process.
Take the case of Tyler Knott Gregson. Seven years ago, he was working as a freelance copywriter. But now with 560,000 followers on Instagram and Tumblr, he has become, in Alter’s inspired words, “the literary equivalent of a unicorn: a best-selling celebrity poet.”
As Alter writes, “Mr. Gregson belongs to a new generation of young, digitally astute poets, whose loyal online followings have helped to catapult them onto the best-seller lists, where poetry books are scarce. These amateur poets are not winning literary awards, and most have never been to a graduate writing workshop.”
Consider this: Gregson’s first published book of poetry, Chasers of the Light, has more than 120,000 copies in print. His new book, All the Words are Yours, has a first printing of 100,000 copies. And then consider this: Louise Gluck’s extraordinary Faithful and Virtuous Night, last year’s winner of the National Book Award for poetry, has sold roughly 20,000 copies.
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