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Sell your poetry on eBay. Find creative ways to display your poetry, such as in a beautiful picture frame or as greeting cards and sell it to the public via eBay. Write Your Own eBook With Help From The Experts.
So one of the best and most straightforward ways to earn some money with your poems is to sell them through online eBook platforms. The most popular and widely used are: Amazon Kindle Store – royalties – 70% per sale. Kobo Books – royalties – 70% per sale – great for international audiences.
Despite the fact that writing poetry generally doesn’t secure a poet their rent, many poets do make money from their craft. For one, some poets work as program coordinators for writing programs or as editors for magazines like Poets & Writers. So, yes, there are some salaried jobs in poetry or poetry-adjacent fields.
The following are companies that allow you to write poems and earn money:
You can sell poems to magazines and literary journals, both large and small, print or digital, for cash. Pay rate, on average, is between 50 cents to $2 per line. Check out submission guidelines for Poets & Writers magazine, Poetry magazine, The Sun magazine, and many more.
Many of the most successful poets these days are poetry professors, so they make their money teaching—and that cool $75,000 average puts you at the high end of your profession (source). The artist-in-residence poets might get a stipend, but usually they’re not actually making an income while working.
Social-media poets, using Instagram as a marketing tool, are not just artists—they’re entrepreneurs. They still primarily earn money through publication and live events, but sharing their work on Instagram is now what opens up the possibility for both.
Poetry remains a niche market. Even large bookshops will typically just sell acknowledged classics, academic anthologies, and a few books by today’s most famous poets. A collection of poetry might well only sell a few hundred copies. Few will make a profit.
Ten pages is really short, even for a chapbook. Full chapbooks (say, the median is roughly 20–30 pages) can and usually do sell for somewhere between five or six dollars up to ten or twelve dollars (sometimes even a little more!), depending on the production quality and length of the chapbook—and who the poet is.
Publishing a collection of poetry is a great accomplishment for any writer. Luckily, you don’t have to be a bestselling author to get your book of poetry published. Between traditional publishers, small presses, and self-publishers, there are now more opportunities than ever to get your poems in front of an audience.
Yes, publishing is difficult. And by publishing well, I mean publishing good poems in venues other people think are important, the kind of venues that can garner you literary cache. One of the first things you have to decide as a writer is how much that matters to you, literary cache.
Where to publish your poetry: 5 ways to become a published poet
Selling poetry is simple:
Prolific Press Publishing: The chapbook program at Prolific Press shoots for 20 pages of poetry or fiction, not including front matter etc. Full-length poetry manuscripts ought to be 60 to 110 pages of poetry (about 100 pages is very common). Fiction books should not exceed 120K words.
Poetry book publishers often define a poetry book as any collection of poems longer than 48 pages.
In book publishing, an anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler; it may be a collection of plays, poems, short stories, songs or excerpts by different authors.
This is the reality of poetry publishing. There are certainly presses that sell more copies. A poetry title reviewed in The New York Times can sell 2-4k copies, it is true. But small, independent presses, those small shops, usually run by one or a few people, rarely see those kinds of sales.
Where to sell your poetry books
So what is a good sales figure for any book? “A sensational sale would be about 25,000 copies,” says literary agent Jane Dystel. “Even 15,000 would be a strong enough sale to get the publisher’s attention for the author for a second book.”