- Some thoughts on the topic of print on demand from Mairead Byrne, quoted (with permission) from the British & Irish Poets mailing list.
Print-on-demand is a broken link: stone cold. If you can deal with a pod company you know, where you have contacts, can call etc, it would be different. My experience has been no human contact and I didn’t like it. Opinions vary widely on this topic. I publish a lot online. It’s indispensable to me. I love it. Having a blog surprisingly does not replace books, however. I need those little demons. They are the handshakes of poetry, to say the least. I put them in people’s hands and they put their books in mine. We all lose out (financially!). There’s nothing to beat a book designed and printed by someone you know or will meet, I think. My best readers in the world are my publishers. I learn most from them. Also because of the investment I know they are making, even more in time than money. I am asking them to take time to move a letter one space left and they do. It strengthens my relationship with and understanding of poetry. Opinions on this vary of course. The idea with paper is to make the poem worth it somehow. I have taken to enclosing short poems like dollar bills in envelopes I send. The web and print complement each other madly. They are a crazy couple. Who would have thought it would work out.