APPENDIX
I
MARKET FOR VERSE
There is no market nowadays for the long poem except from writers of established reputation. As a rule the shorter the verse the better its chance of acceptance. Verse humorous is easier to dispose of than verse serious because there is a wider field. Puck, Judge, Life, Smart Set, Ainslee’s, Harper’s, Century, and an army of others are always willing to buy really amusing verse.
Serious verse is sold in lesser quantities, but the price is better—when the production is bought by a high-class publication. The Atlantic Monthly is always on the lookout for new writers and other magazines are prompt to recognize what pleases them even in the work of a newcomer. Perhaps the most standard popular forms of serious verse are the sonnet and the short love lyric.
Many editors are glad to buy quatrains and even couplets to fill out a page when a longer form would be rejected. The well-written triolet is also sure of a hearing for this same reason.
Newspapers pay little or nothing for verse except when a special writer is put on the staff to supply a column of verse a day. Occasionally some topical stanza which agrees with the editorial policy will be accepted from an outsider. It may be pointed out here that very often the humor or appropriateness of a production will overbalance faults in the rhyme and meter. In serious verse an exception of this sort will rarely be found and a thing must stand or fall on its real merits.
There is no sure way to determine the market except by personal investigation. Read the magazines till you find out where the editor’s preference lies and then try him with something of your own, written not in imitation but on the same general lines. Do not send out your verse in a hit-or-miss fashion. Separate the limericks and the love songs and send them each to their appointed editor.
In spite of the protestations of interested publishers the reading public does not interest itself in the volume of “collected poems.” A book of this sort is rarely looked at unless it runs very much out of the ordinary or comes as the product of some well-known author.