: Re: Self publishing a collection of poems I have written four poems and will keep writing more. How many should I put under one collection, and around how many pages should it be? Any ideas on

@Samaraweera193

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The typical format for small, personal poetry collections is the chapbook. You can actually put one together yourself, it's really just several sheets of letter paper folded in half with a cover made of heavier stock. If you do a poem a page, you can handle somewhere between 12 and 24 poems in this format.

It's definitely the lowest cost option for self-publishing, and has a long history and good reputation in the poetry community. Since most publishers don't handle poetry, and the market for poetry is limited, there's less stigma around self-publishing in the poetry community than elsewhere. There are even legitimate competitions for poetry chapbooks.

You should probably expect all your sales to be from books you sell personally after doing a reading somewhere. It's very unlikely that people will purchase any poetry book from an unknown writer without a personal connection.

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