I've been thinking recently about trying to sort through my poems and see what I have in the way of another pamphlet or a collection, so one particular book immediately caught my eye!

[More:]

101 Ways to Make Poems Sell: The Salt Guide to Getting and Staying Published by Chris Hamilton-Emery, paperback, Salt Publishing

The title of this book neatly sums up what it is all about – and, what's more, I was delighted to find it delivers exactly what it promises.

Some of the advice is a reminder of common sense points like keeping one's CV up to date and the importance of networking. But the book also contains many other suggestions and ideas for eg profile raising that I'd not even considered before. And while the book particularly appealed to me because it was specific to poetry, many of the techniques are ones which will work for fiction and even non-fiction too.

I suppose as publishing director of Salt Publishing one would expect Hamilton-Emery to know what he is talking about. But the fact that the advice he offers works (eg the importance of listing and networking) is also clear from how I came to buy the book myself: the title caught my eye from a list of recommended reading in the Poetry School Online's Towards a Collection by Pascale Petit. (Credit where credit's due, I also found this course thanks to a piece about the Poetry School Online on Jon's blog.)

On a personal level, I found the book very positive and motivational, given one often hears about how hard it is to make money from any kind of creative writing, let alone poetry. Its layout is also very clear and easy to read (like Lo and Mo's The ABC Checklist for New Writers, but more on that when I've finished it). The concise numbered (101 Ways!) sections within chapters are great for those like me whose reading is often interrupted, be it by work, ones own writing, kids, pets or chatty next-door neighbours!

Usually, I have a not very professional method of dog-earing book pages to help remind me where to find poems I like, information that is particularly useful or points I ought to follow up. But with this book, my system is practically useless as I soon found I was dog-earing nearly every page! In fact, the only frustrating thing about the book is that I wish I'd known about it before I published my pamphlet Conception to mark my boys' thanksgiving. Though that was not a book for selling in the same way as I'd now like to get a collection together, it could still have benefited from a lot of the advice.

However, at least I now have some pointers to work on for next time. I might start by emailing Hamilton-Emery about how useful I've found the book ;-) and then I think my profile could do with a little facelift and my website some new décor!