Why You Should Purchase Copies of Your Poetry Book From Your Publisher

If your book gets published, it is a good idea to purchase copies of your own book. Yes, you will get some free author copies, but those aren’t really enough. Besides, you should also get a generous author’s discount on purchases of your book. So  why you should purchase copies of your poetry book from your publisher? Here’s a short list in no particular order:

1. You should support your publisher. This is done for a few reasons. One to help them recoup costs so they can print other poets. Besides, they have faith in your book, so give a little back for that faith. Plus, the publisher might remember this when your next book is looking for a publisher. But the reason is more of the former.
2. You will want to have copies to sell at your readings. This is where you will really make your money. You will get an author discount when you purchase your copies. That discount should be at around 50%. When you sell them at retail price, you will make double your money back, which at the time will be enough to buy a good dinner, a good bottle of wine, or some one else’s collection of poems.
3. You can sell copies to an independent book store on consignment and make some money. You won’t make as much as at a reading, but you will make some. The general consignment rule is 60/40. If your book is retailed at $10, the bookstore should give you $6 for every sale. (You will have to come back at some later time to collect the money.)
4. You will want to  have copies to swap with other poets. This will happen a lot, and it’s a good way to start, establish, or continue a friendship with a fellow poet. Giving is always good, and swapping is even better.
5. You will also want to have copies to give to some one you like or appreciate or to give to a poet you admire. Maybe you will meet someone and have a good time with them. A good end to that good time is to give them a copy of your book, but only if it comes up in conversation that you have a book. (You shouldn’t just randomly give them a book. That’s awkward.) You will also want to give copies to those teachers you admire or who stimulated you or supported you. I do. It feels so good. I think those teachers appreciate it, too, since they get to see something for all the time they put in. They will be happy. And most important, you will want to send copies to those poets who you admire and that shaped and affected your poetry. W. S. Merwin and William Heyen have copies of all my books. (Also, you can give a copy to someone you want to impress. Like someone you are attracted to and want to win over.)
6. You will want to have copies to give to family members. Sure the family should be supportive and purchase copies, but, hey, it’s your family. They love you. They support your enough already. Give them a copy. (The same holds true for close friends.)
7. Your publisher may or may not send out review copies of your book. If they do, there may be some places you can think of that they did not. Perhaps there is a journal you frequently appear in. They might want to see a copy of your book. Since they published you a lot, they must like your poetry. Thus, they are a good place to hope for a review. Or maybe you know a reviewer, so you should send them a copy. Really, you just want to get your book out there. You want as many people to read your book as you can. Your poems want to change and/or save lives.
8. This following reason is probably the most important  reason: You will want to have copies to sell after the publisher is sold out. Most likely there will only be one print run, so get as many copies as you can to last you for the rest of your life because the book will most likely never be printed again. In other words – HOARD. You’ll thank me for this when your seventy and you want to give a copy of your first book to someone who you currently don’t even know exists.

Here’s some additional advice. If you win a contest, use at least half the prize money to purchase copies for all the reasons above. Plus, at this rate, they are free because you’ve got all this new, unexpected money.

Basically, it comes to down to supporting and sharing. And when your older, it will come down to sentimentality. Your children might want copies. And if you are successful, so will some biographer. But, basically, you will want to hold the book in your hands. If you are like me, you will want all of your books on display at your funeral. At my funeral, I’ll have all my books on display and each issue of Redactions on display. It will be my opus. People will be able to see what I created and left behind.

No one is too big for this advice.//

Rob Carney and Tom Holmes Poetry Reading (1-27-12)

Friday, January 27 at 7:30 p.m. –  Rob Carney (from Utah) and Tom Holmes at RIT Liberal Arts Faculty Commons (06-1251), right across from the Wallace Library.

That’s right I’ll be reading with Rob Carney. One of the three people to whom I dedicated Poems for an Church. So if you like my poetry, you’ll love his poetry even more. Plus, he’s an awesome reader. And if love mythic poems, this is a reading that shouldn’t be missed.

Rob Carney is the author of number of books, including Story Problems (Somondoco Press, 2011),  Weather Report (Somondoco P, 2006) and Boasts, Toasts, and Ghosts (Pinyon Press, 2003), winner of the Pinyon Press National Poetry Book Award — and two chapbooks, New Fables, Old Songs (Dream Horse Press, 2003) and This Is One Sexy Planet (Frank Cat Press, 2005). His work has appeared in Mid-American Review, Quarterly West, and dozens of other journals, as well as Flash Fiction Forward (W. W. Norton, 2006). He lives in Salt Lake City. To hear an interview with him, the Poet Laureate of Utah, Katharine Coles, and the editor at Sugar House Review, John Kippen, click here. He is also a former guest editor of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics.

Tom Holmes is the editor of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics (www.redactions.com). He is also author of: Poems for an Empty Church (Palettes & Quills Press, 2011), which was nominated for The Pulitzer Prize; The Oldest Stone in the World (Amsterdam Press, 1-1-11, 12:00:00 a.m (the first book released in 2011)); Henri, Sophie, & the Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound: Poems Blasted from the Vortex (BlazeVOX Books, 2009); Pre-Dew Poems (FootHills Publishing, 2008); Negative Time (Pudding House, 2007); After Malagueña (FootHills Publishing, 2005), and Poetry Assignments: The Book (Sage Hill Press, forthcoming). And he has thrice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

This event is sponsored by RIT and Palettes & Quills.//

Best Poetry Books in 2011

According to No Tell Poetry and Michael Meyerhofer, my poetry book, Poems for an Empty Church (Palettes & Quills), was one of the best poetry books released in 2011. You can read the full list here: http://notellpoetry.blogspot.com/2011/12/best-poetry-books-of-2011-michael.html.

Why not order a copy now?! Just click here.//

redactions: poetry & poetics 2011 pushcart prize nominations

It’s that time of year again, and Redactions: Poetry & Poetics, with its guest editor Sean Thomas Dougherty and editor Tom Holmes, has nominated its six favorite poems. The nominees in the order of appearance in issue 14 (The I-90 Poetry Revolution issue) are:

1. Jonathan Farmer’s “Jellyfish” (pages 10-11)
2. Holly Virginia Clark’s “The Birdhouse” (pages 18-19)
3. Lisa Akus’ “Pumpkin Poem (Untitled)” (page 36)
4. Martha Silano’s “Size” (page 43)
5. Keetje Kuipers’ “Letter to an Inmate in Solitary Confinement” (page 49)
6. Philip Metres’ “Letter to St. Petersburg” (page 50)

To read these poems and more, order a copy of the I-90 Poetry Revolution Issue from here: http://www.etsy.com/shop/redactionspoetry.

You can also read the Pushcart Prize nominated poems here: http://www.redactions.com/pushcart-poems.asp.

 

//

Poems for an Empty Church Book Release Reading and Party

Oh yeah. October is just around the corner, and you know what that means, don’t you? Yup. My girlfriend celebrates her birthday. And it’s time to celebrate Ezra Pound’s birthday.

And the Yankees make the playoffs. And it’s Halloween. And Tom Holmes has a book-release reading and party.

That’s right. I’ll be reading at A Different Path Gallery on Saturday, October 22 at 7:30 p.m. at the wonderful art gallery in downtown Brockport, A Different Path Gallery, located at 27 Market Street.

[To download a printable version of the poster, click Poems for an Empty Church PDF.]

Oh yeah. Good times. Poetry, wine, food, and you. Come for the wine. Stay for the poetry.

Here’s what they are saying about the book:

I’ve had a good time with Poems for an Empty Church, which is a big book, capacious, and surprised me with its often free-flowing and associational aesthetics.  As you want (usually) a cubist perspective(s), and as you say you want your poem/accept your poem as smarter than you are, you hit all sorts of interesting effects.  So, friend, way to go. I peered through the rocks into that eye & land of yours ….

– William Heyen, author of Shoah Train (finalist for the National Book Award)

Of course, no church is ever really empty unless people let ritual and myth lapse into repetition and dogma. Even then it isn’t empty, just empty of awe. That’s when origin stories are most necessary, and that’s what Tom Holmes provides in abundance: Moons create amazement, then stones create reflection, then people come along creating words, aggression, fire, flutes, art, physics, and probably our destruction, everything progressing ’til it returns full circle. Along the way, “statues pry themselves from sides of buildings / and exit the city / clutching their plaques.” Along the way, a lot of fine poems unfold, one containing a curse: “you have succeeded / in being only what you thought / you should be.” It’s a curse because we ought to be more. In a century in need of a giant do-over, Poems for an Empty Church reminds us of that. Even better, it makes a good lever or spark.

– Rob Carney, author of Story Problems, Weather Report, and Boasts, Toasts, and Ghosts

In Poems for an Empty Church, Tom Holmes writes of birth and death and the life we live in between those two events in beautifully sculpted lines carved into the white space that surrounds them. “I dare say I can hear / muddy angels singing /the lines of God,” he writes in “The Calculus of a Tod Marshall Book of Poems.” There are plenty of angels in Tom Holmes’ poems too, but one must be still enough to hear and appreciate the whisk of wings hovering over these powerful meditations.

– Sarah Freligh, author of Sort of Gone

I think of Charles Olsen when I read Tom Holmes’ poems: open, investigative, prophetic, often with mystical implications. These are the elements of our best modernist poems, and Holmes is a modernist – or a pre-modernist, or a post-pre-modernist. And there lies the real interesting part of his poems, they are hard to fit into anyone anywhere. He sits us in an empty church and says listen. He knows “it was the moons talked first.” He knows the dreams we dream even when “we wheeze / asleep in our boxes of shadows.” In these poems and parables is our collective of fire and nightfall, origins and endings, monochromatics, rivers, and stretch marks. Sappho makes a rare presence, but this is a book more stone-carved than page-written and she too is an ancient muse. As this author’s I is an absent eye, scanning the world of caves and shadows to find clouds who feed themselves, ghosts like alphabets, and men who whittle bones into flutes.

– Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line and Broken Hallelujahs

Poems for an Empty Church was officially released September 2, 2011, from Palettes & Quills. Founded in 2002, Palettes & Quills is devoted to the celebration and expansion of the literary and visual arts and offers both commissioned and consulting services. Palettes & Quills works to support beginning and emerging writers and artists to expand their knowledge, improve their skills, and connect to other resources in the community. Further, Palettes & Quills seeks to increase the public’s awareness and appreciation of these arts through education, advocacy, hands-on assistance, and by functioning as a literary press.//