Anyone home? Australian poets on Twitter

There are a raft of essays and interviews going around regarding paying the writers and more specifically writers being prepared to subscribe to the magazines in which they hope to appear - a call to invest.

My subscriptions to Australian Journals and Poetry Communities will have to wait till Christmas but I can afford to drop some cash on poetry collections. 

So for the past two weeks on a Friday or a Saturday I have tweeted out to my followers, a call for fellow Australian poets to tweet me links to their work on Kobo (my preferred eBook retailer). 

I have had one reply from an on-the-ball publisher and that was the first week, nothing from this morning’s tweet. I can assure you if I tweeted a call out for self published novelists to send me their work, I would have had been inundated until the end of time. 

Frankly I was disappointed.  I expected more to be honest, even a “ Well I’m not on Kobo but you can get my work here” response.  Now I don’t have 50,000 followers but I have a reasonably diverse group of about 2700, and the tweet was imaginatively hashtaged  #poetry.

One response after tweeting morning and afternoon.

I checked to see if the Zombie Apocalypse had started without me.  It hadn’t.

 

What can I assume from this?

1. My network of tweeters doesn’t contain enough Australian Poets with collections on Kobo?
2. Not enough Australian poets use social media?
3. Everyone was off writing poetry?
4. Australian poets are shy and retiring?
5. ?

I’ll keep putting the call out.  Keep combing through best of the year lists and picking out the poets that I like but really, some self promotion would be welcome.

 

Oh and if your wondering about the book I bought it was Subliminal Dust by Pooja Mittal.  Feel free to suggest Australian poets in the comments who have a collection in any digital form.