Business models

I know my mate Graham Nunn over at Another Lost Shark will be sitting up in his chair when he sees this piece come through his RSS feed.  Thanks also to Chris Meade at if:book London for the heads up.

PoetrySpeaks.com is a way-impressive new online community for poets and poetry. In his plug on bookfutures, Chris describes PoetrySpeaks as “an attempt to create an iTunes, and thus an economic model, for poetry”. This naturally fascinated me so I went to check it out and I think what Dominique Raccah and Sourcebooks have created is much bigger in vision than an online retail aggregator for poetry sales.  They have also created a social network and a suite of third-generation DIY marketing and publishing tools for poets and small presses.

According to the website, here’s what PoetrySpeaks is aiming to achieve:

To create a site where readers/lovers of poetry and those new to poetry, in short anyone with the least possible interest in poetry, can connect with a poem that touches, moves, and inspires them.

To make that poetry visceral/immediate so that they keep coming back to explore, discover, and find new poems and therefore new poets.

To create a site for poets where they can perform, share, and sell their poems and interact with readers, fans, and other poets.

But most of all, to create a site where poets and poetry (of all varieties) can be discovered and where the value of poetry can be enhanced in our everyday culture.

This is a smart application of an emergent business model built around communities of interest. And the great thing is, PoetrySpeaks has a high chance of succeeding.

Thanks to Graham, the Queensland Poetry Festival and other energetic participants in my local poetry community, I’ve had a front-seat view of just how vibrant the global movement of contemporary poetry is. Here’s something a lot of people don’t get (at least those not consuming or publishing poetry): Poetry is extremely social. Especially thanks to the rise of slam and performance, modern practitioners are adept at fostering audiences and networks (often across regions and continents). Many poets I know have channelled this into successful DIY publishing projects, are keen to experiment with new income-earning opportunities such as events, merchandise and new media, and also understand that selling poetry is about going to where your audience is, instead of expecting to be found in a bookstore. In fact, I’d go as far to say that the modern poetry community has more in common with the indie music sector than it does with traditional book publishing.

PoetrySpeaks appears to understand all these things absolutely and has delivered a custom-built platform to support poets and poetry audiences. I look forward to watching this site grow, not least because it will make a fantastic template for similar ventures in other niche content communities.

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