Added to the new feed

OK, I've finished going through the sidebar presses and added everything I could to the feed:

achiote press
Belladonna Books
BlazeVOX
Blood Pudding Press
bloof books: news
Bootstrap News
Center for Book Arts news
Cracked Slab Books - MySpace Blog
Cuneiform Press
dancing girl press news
dbqplist
Dos Press Chapbook Series
Fewer & Further Press
g o n g
Hex Presse
horse less press
hOt whiskey blog
House Press
Katalanché Press Chapbooks
Kitchen Press Chapbooks
Lame House Press
Meritage Press (via Eileen Tabios's Angelic Poker blog)
MiPOesias Blogisimo
Otoliths Books (via Mark Young's Gamma Ways blog)
Pavement Saw Press
pilot poetry
Pinch Pinch Press
Press Press Press
Rope-a-Dope
Rose Metal Press
shadowbox press
sona web / sona books
Stray Dog Press
SWITCHBACK BOOKS
TRANSMISSION PRESS

If your press is not on this list, it's because I couldn't find a feed for it. If you've got a feed I've missed, email me or post it in the comments box below. Also, if you post announcements some other place than your press site--like on your personal blog--and that has a feed, let me know.

The sidebar window will show the latest 30 updates or you can click READ MORE. You may also subscribe to the full feed here.

Feed vs. Facebook

It's really bugging me (still, again) that we can't keep up with the constant stream of announcements re: new releases, readings, articles and interviews. So I've been pondering a couple of different ways to automate the process for DIY cooperative presses.

The first thing I considered was making an editor from each press a blog administrator. But I believe there is a numerical limit that we'd exceed. Also, we'd then have to set forth some kind of posting guidelines about formatting, frequency, etc.

The second solution I considered was creating a Facebook group, and leaving that "open" so that anyone could post links, announcements, email the group members, etc. While this is still a very attractive option, the drawback is that it would only be accessible to those with Facebook accounts. Though they're free to set up, I hesitate to ask anyone who is not already a Facebook user to open yet another account. Also, nonusers could not stumble across the group via a Google search--a point of entry that accounts for a good bit of traffic here.

The third possible solution would be to install an aggregate feed, which would gather the latest posts from all member sites for display on this site--in some kind of sidebar box or above the top post. (This would probably replace the Press Press Press window, which doesn't really work the way I wanted it to, and Press Press Press would anyway be included).

Any other suggestions? I think I'll play around with the feed and see what I can do. I would LOVE to see the announcements kept up to date, and that would alleviate our blog-guilt enough to spend more time writing original reviews/articles/interviews and posting relevant links to reviews/articles/interviews found elsewhere.

I've also received a couple of queries about a listserv via which DIY producers could talk shop. Maybe a supplemental Facebook group or Google group would be good for that, but somebody else would need to be available to moderate it!

UPDATE: So I've installed a feed window and am adding member pages to our subscription list--see right. Unfortunately, your site must have a feed in order to be included in this new system. If you're already using Blogger, you should be fine. If not, consider integrating a feed for your news page! (It's fairly simple to integrate Blogger into a site hosted on a private domain. I do this for my own blog & the Bloof blog. Blogger Help offers instructions here. Trust me, you'll love it if you update your news page frequently.)

Just in case you don't already visit daily...

...stop by Ron Silliman's blog to peruse his answers to a Poetry Foundation questionnaire on the state of the art, which include several astute observations about industrial vs. small-scale, self- and DIY-publishing:

The consequence is that there are more active poets now than ever, but that the total addressable market for any given book of poems is likely to be much smaller. The trade presses have acknowledged this by largely abandoning the publication of poetry altogether, because for most the economics are not there to support the infrastructure required for a major trade publication.

&

And the role of the self-published book, the commercial object with perhaps the least prestige of all, has been important to poetry in the U.S. from Whitman to the web editions of today. But try to get Ingram to distribute your little chapbook. The book industry is exactly that, and its relationship to poetry is counter-intuitive at best. The days when major publishers brought out poetry as a “loss leader” (or because some poet might turn into a profitable novelist) are almost entirely behind us. The number of trade publishers who even touch poetry are so few, and their collective aesthetics so very narrow, that they have largely relegated themselves to irrelevance.

Lots more good stuff to ponder.

Part 1
Part 2