What to do with your Poetry?

Writer's Market is a great book and website to find literary agents. They even have a submission tracker.

Recently a young friend of mine asked me how she could get her poetry published. I'm not an expert when it comes to poetry but I figure it's similar to the short story market, so I thought I'd share some of my advice with you. This also applies to the short story market. You can share poetry on a blog, forum, website, newsletter, etc. You can also self-publish (http://www.iuniverse.com/ or http://www.booksurge.com/ or http://www.xlibris.com/ or http://www.authorhouse.com/) or create an e-Book or audiobook of your work. Some already-popular people are able to get a traditional publisher to publish their poetry, but that's rare and they don't sell too well. There are some scams out there where you pay to get published on a website or you have to buy a couple of over-priced books to get your poems published in them. Those are not legitimate avenues and few people will ever read your poems in those types of books. Literary agents typically don't represent authors of short fiction or poetry, so you might be on your own until you can make a name for yourself.   Now if you're going to write books, that's a totally different story. After your book is finished and polished, you'll write a 1-page letter to a literary agent telling them about your book, yourself, and why they should represent you. You include a self-addressed stamped envelope for their response, which can take weeks to months to get back. Most often their response is a no, so you'll have to try and try again. Sometimes they'll ask for a partial or for the whole book. You can send letters to multiple agents at the same time but you should only send your actual book to one at a time when they ask. Then when you finally get an agent they'll send letters to the publishers and the waiting game continues. It took 1 year before my publisher said yes after I sent them my book.   Here are a few websites to help you with query letters and finding out who to send them to. You'll want to go to each agent's website and read their guidelines and follow the rules to the letter. Writers Market is a great book to get. http://www.writersmarket.com/ http://bookmarket.com/ http://pred-ed.com/pubagent.htm   Here's a section on my website to help you with your writing: http://www.paraworlds.com/tips/

That boy has more metal in his mouth than teeth, so I’m not too surprised, but I’m scared that it might be a sign of bad things to come.