Average Salary of Jobs with Titles Matching Your Search
In USD as of Aug 9, 2010
20k 40k 60k poetry in Boston, MA
$50,000
poetry in Iowa City, IA
$38,000
[Blogger won't let me use the html code to put in a fancy-schmancy graph, you can follow this link to see for yourself at SimplyHired.com]
But anyway---Yeah Boston Poets---put those Iowa Workshop brats in the hole! Of course, I think the Simply Hired salary data is hocus-pocus, but it generates a laugh all the same. I do often wonder about how I might someday "monetize" my poetry writing energy and output. There are two professions I can say I was born to partake in. One, sales. Two, poetry.
The making of a sale, the manufacture of the sales process is not unlike the making of a poem or the poetic process. Both require depth of "product" knowledge, control of execution, a palpable degree of entertaining ability, and an overall resonating meaning that elicits thought from the prospect/reader.
In sales, I can make 50K in a bad year and clear 100K in a banner year. Poetry, on the other hand, well I've been at it for a while, albeit without much marketing effort thus far---with poetry I couldn't make the cost of a cup a tea. There are 26,000 new fiction titles that come out every year. Who knows how many new poetry titles come out. There are nearly 90,000 publishers in the U.S. and they put out collectively more than 100,000 new titles every year across every genre and subject area. The publishing industry nets somewhere between $30 and $40 billion each year. Some markets are still growing about 30% annually, but those are tied to education.
For poets to make money, well, they must first be good and deserving an audience. This criteria is a lenient one, it seems, as almost any New Yorker magazine reveals. And if your name is Galway Kinnell or Shel Silverstein, you have raked in a fortune via the poetic process. But neither a lifetime achievement award or a widely popular trans-generational poetry series can be claimed by every poet out there, even the good ones.
The most a good poet can expect in terms of compensation, beside the contributor's copies, is an active
