[New-Poetry] Online vs Print, again

[TheOldMole]

An exchange I recently had with George Simmers, editor of Snakeskin, a 
British online journal that's published a few poems of mine:

Mole:
 George -- I send out announcements of my online publications to a 
mailing list of about 300 people, and apparently it reaches farther than 
that. I ran into someone I knew from years ago at an art opening
recently, and he told me someone had passed on the Snakeskin link to him 
-- he'd checked it out, and read not only my poem but the rest of the 
issue, and loved all of it.

George:
Thanks - that's good to know. Some months I wonder whether we're getting 
through to anyone much, and then comes feedback like this to show that 
it's all worth doing.

It's always nice to have feedback to show that it's all worth doing. I 
wish my life would have some. But any thoughts on this in the 
print-vs.-online debate? My family doesn't even read the print journals 
I'm in. But at least most of the people on my mailing list -- and some 
that it gets passed along to -- read at least my poems in online 
journals, and as we see here, at least sometimes they read more.

This in itself doesn't usher in a new golden age of readers for poetry, 
but it's a group of readers that almost certainly would not be there 
otherwise.

Does anyone else here send out similar announcements? Any feedback? Any 
thoughts on the value of this sort of audience building?



-- 
Tad Richards
http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/
http://opusforty.blogspot.com/