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Talk:Blue Wizard Is About To Die!

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Best selling?

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Blue Wizard Is About To Die! "sold more than 5,000 copies internationally, making it one of the best-selling poetry collections of 2004."[3]

Wow, I mean, thats not a whole lot. The implication here is that it may be possible to print then purchase enough copies of your own poetry for less than it costs to go to a liberal arts college for a degree in this field. What would a publisher look at more - a degree, or a bestseller? Something seems wrong here... but since its referenced I have a feeling its something wrong with society and not the article... Zaphraud (talk) 20:26, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, 5000 is pretty good for poetry. To get an idea how small the market for contemporary poetry is, just try googling for sales stats - you'll find hardly any because no one cares. After a good deal of effort, bypassing tons of stats on all sorts of other published materials, I finally found http://www.tcboyle.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=634&pid=5532&mode=threaded&start= which says the British public bought 700,000 books of poetry in 2002 - in total. Compare this to the sales of anything on the fiction best seller lists (to say nothing of the really popular stuff like Harry Potter), and keep in mind that this surely includes all the old classics bought for collections or for school, and per new publication, there aren't a lot of sales left. Here's another good quote:

'Esther Morgan is one of Bloodaxe's most acclaimed recent "finds"; her first collection, Beyond Calling Distance, was published in 2001 and has sold a modest if, for poetry, respectable 700 copies. She says penetrating the "hermetically sealed" poetry world can be tough for new writers. To give others an easier time getting established than she had, the 32-year-old has set up her own periodical, Reaction, as a vessel for unpublished young poets.'

--Gwern (contribs) 15:02 2 August 2009 (GMT)
Disregard that - the references were non-existent, the supplied ref was actually a spam (tourism industry) page about things to do in Las Vegas.
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