Is it wise to put one's poetry on a blog?

If you’re good, and you’re ardently pursuing publication, I think it can only help. Increasing your visibility will create an interest in your work, and books are not in competition with blogs. It’s a completely different medium – certainly publishers regard it as such, and they are the ones who will accept or reject a collection.

If your primary interest is readership, I think it would help. If you’re interested in protecting your copyright, maybe not so much.

The middle way here might be self-publication, which has become respectable in recent years.

It’s a great idea to put it on a blog, whether you’re still nurturing your talents or you’re an accomplished poet.

Publishing your work on a blog doesn’t forfeit your ownership of that material. You can always copyright everything you create anyway, if you feel the need to protect your work. If you’re eventually published in the ‘traditional’ sense, you can still use that poetry you’ve published online, so there’s really no reason not to.

In actuality, creating a compendium online can be a helpful practice and with some integration on Google, you can even become an authority in the poetry realm and make a name for yourself, on the free marketing potential of Google. Because Google is so powerful and far reaching, it could become the very channel by which you make a name for yourself, and I’ll explain that here.

If you create a Google Plus profile, and you have a small author bio on each post in your blog (along with a page somewhere on the blog that represents an author profile of yourself), then you can add “Authorship Markup” to all your posts, and add yourself as a contributor to your blog within your Google Plus profile. Make sure you use a picture of yourself on all these places, and try to keep the pic the same across all this stuff.

It doesn’t hurt to reach out and network with writing and poetry groups on G+ too, although it’s not absolutely necessary for Authorship Markup. Here’s Google’s guide on what exactly I’m talking about with authorship, and how to activate it. One cool benefit of this is that Google will start to learn who you are and start building your authority on the internet for the subjects of your writing. Also, whenever your stuff pops up in Google searches, your name and picture will be shown along side your results and links to your poetry.

Now then for a little advanced stuff… what a lot of people don’t realize is that Google is morphing and changing, big time. It is going away from the “library” type search that we’ve all been used to all along, and switching to something called “Knowledge Graph”. This new search engine method will no longer simply look at keywords and spit out some matching pages. Instead, it will focus on actual entities of our world – namely people. Google will now care tremendously more about actual people, names, brands, ideas, etc. So this is the prefect time to start building your authority and your name as a poet on the web.

Feel free to message me if you wanna learn more. How do I know all this stuff? I’m a Search Marketing specialis, ask me anything!

The reason I mentioned copyright is that anything posted online is easily stolen. Once someone has appropriated your work and attached his or her own copyright statement to it, how would you ever prove it was yours?

A compendium is a summary or brief account, by the way.

I started a tumblr this year for my writings – short pieces, poems, writing class assignments. It keeps it all in one place for me and I’m able to share it with interested people.

I am nowhere near talented enough for printed publication. But I am pretty happy with it this way.

If you put anything you might want to publish later for money, put your © on it.

@Jeruba , there are myriad ways to secure your writing and publish it online. Firstly, there are ways to determine which copy of an online work was first to be published. There is an online tool called Copyscape that is specifically designed to protect writers from plagiarism and content thieves. And if you really want to secure your writing, you would obviously copyright it officially before putting it online. In essence, there are numerous ways to prove it’s yours.

So what if other people steal content? Most of the time it will benefit the original author more, and harm (or do nothing for) the thief. I write stuff on the internet all the time and tons of it gets stolen, but I call it a publicity win in most cases. If you find a source that has copied your work and is either (A)Claiming it to be their own work , or (B)Posting it on a less than savory website, it doesn’t take much to get that stuff taken away. Most of the time, though, I let it be. And if the OP wants to take every precaution, he can do a ‘test run’ by posting some drafts or something on there to see what happens to his writing.

As for the meaning of ‘compendium’, i’m not even gonna split hairs on that. I used it properly and I’m sure there’s more than one source offering the definition including Wikipedia.

EDIT: One more thing. I guess my humble opinion is such that I believe the benefit of leveraging Google towards the pursuit of becoming an authority outweighs the slight risk and hassle of defending a copyright to the work.

I would try submitting your poems to magazines, poetry competitions etc first. If you get nowhere you could post them on a blog. It is good that poems be read, if they are stuck in a drawer somewhere unread, what are they?

I’m not sure I understand the fear surrounding “protecting your copyright”. If you can show that you published it first, online or wherever else, the copyright is yours. People can copy it as easily from a book as they can from a web page.

And so what if someone reproduces it? This will not take any money out of the author’s pocket. If they attribute it to the author, then it’s publicity. If they don’t, and the use is offensive, you can sue them. If they don’t, and the use is inoffensive, who cares?

If the fear is that someone will collect your poems and have them published as his own… no matter how good the poems are, I just don’t think that is realistic.

Fear? The OP asked about wisdom. There’s a certain wisdom in caution, it seems to me. That’s all. Why not consider the down side as well as the up side of something, while you’re contemplating it?

Accusations can go both ways. I wouldn’t want to be accused of plagiarism by someone who’d appropriated my work, whether there was any profit involved or not.

I saw a company invest about 18 months in a project to rewrite its own original online materials because someone else had republished the work as their own, making a few small changes, enough to raise doubts. Now the first company was advised by its own legal department to rework its documents so they were not so similar to the materials claimed by the second company. Neither one could establish a firm claim to first publication.

@Jeruba Yes… but see my comment about being realistic. We are talking about poetry publication.

And I will say pre-emptively: I enjoy poetry, I buy books of poetry, I have read blogs which contain poetry. I am not saying that poetry is without value. I am just saying that I don’t think it’s a realistic concern that some random person will appropriate poems published online and somehow affect the amount of money or respect due the author. Or at the very least: what stands to be gained by publishing one’s own poems in a blog far outweighs what stands to be lost.

If you intend to publish professionally in print, don’t publish online. It’s not about protecting your copyright, it’s because publishers tend only to publish “first exclusive rights” which means only work that has not been published elsewhere before. And publishing online counts. The only people who can get away with it are authors who are already established.

On the other hand if you intend to self-publish, which is incredibly easy these days even for print, it doesn’t matter.