ReleaseWire

Poets Find Success Using Social Media – The Writers Bureau Comments

There’s a new generation of best-selling poets taking the world by storm. They’re known as the Instapoets and they’ve started a new movement born out of the social media phenomenon.

Posted: Thursday, December 24, 2015 at 4:00 AM CST

Manchester, England -- (SBWire) -- 12/24/2015 --The Instapoets take photos of their poems, often with drawings and illustrations, and post them across social media networks such as Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter. And thousands of unpublished poets are joining in using the hashtags #instapoetry and #instagrampoetry hoping to achieve the success of award winning poets like New Zealand based Lang Leav.

Leav self-published her first collection of poems – Love and Misadventure – three years ago. It is now the top selling book of love poems on Amazon. Her second collection Lullabies is ranked fourth. Her third collection was published in October 2015 and between these three publications she has sold over 300,000 copies of her books in just three years. She is now signed with US publishers Writers House.

Not only that, she has also won the Quantas Spirit of Youth Award and was the 2014 winner of the Goodreads Choice Awards for Poetry. She's been featured in some of the world's leading newspapers including The New York Times, The Guardian in the UK and Singapore's The Straights Times. Most poets don't get this sort of attention.

Her success is down to having a huge following on her social media accounts which have a combined following of close to a million.

Susie Busby, Principal of The Writers Bureau, a writing college that runs a home-study poetry course said, "The rise of the Instapoets is very exciting and great news for writers wanting to get their poems out there and enjoyed by a large number of people. But it's also very competitive and only the best will find the kind of success enjoyed by Lang Leav.

"One of the keys to great poetry is editing. Just posting the first lines that come into your head probably won't do – unless you're some sort of genius. One of the joys of poetry is that you can savour and revel in language both in the making and reading of a piece. So time and consideration should be put into writing a poem. This is the antithesis of the method of distribution through social media which is incredibly fast paced. So poets think on: before posting make sure you're letting people see the best of your work not just the first draft."

Media Contact:
PR Contact: Susie Busby
The Writers Bureau
8-10 Dutton Street
Manchester M3 1LE
England
Tel: 0161 819 9922
Email:studentservices@writersbureau.com
Url: http://www.writersbureau.com/courses/poetry-writing/