As I mentioned in my last post, I haven’t written fiction or worked on fiction in a long time, although I’m okay with that. What writing I have been working on is poetry.

There are a few things I have discovered about poetry as I started writing my “sonnets from the desert,” as I eventually decided to name them. I discovered that poetry can teach a fiction writer many things.

I clung at first to the truth that my poetry was for me and that I was under no obligation to share it with anyone else. And believe me, I needed that reminder, regularly, to allow myself to be raw and real in my sonnets. With prayer and reflection I did decide to publish them on a new blog and am rolling them out little by little, but that is no requirement for a poet. Poetry does not need…

The cat is out of the bag, finally we know exactly how many self-published authors make it big: 40.

Yes, that’s not a typo.

40 self-published authors “make money”, all the others, and they number in the hundreds of thousands, don’t. This interesting statistic, recently revealed in a New York Times article, applies to the Kindle Store, but since Amazon is in fact the largest digital publishing platform in the world, it is a safe bet that self-published authors are not doing any better elsewhere.

“Making money” here means selling more than one million e-book copies in the last five years. Yes, 40 authors have managed that, and have even gone on to establishing their own publishing house, like Meredith Wild. Her story is fully reported in the New York Times, here, and well worth pondering over.

That story reveals some further nuggets about the current…