|
My name is Nicky Jones. I am a daughter, wife, mother, step-mother, ex teacher and psychotherapeutic counsellor. I live in the beautiful Welsh countryside, and over the past few years have devoted my time to renovating my old stone house, walking my dog, a spaniel called Daisy, and to writing poetry and children’s stories.
I set up Copeland Books in 2008 because I wanted to help the other poets and writers I discovered on the Internet networking site MySpace to get into print. When I joined MySpace a year ago, I was immediately amazed and impressed by how much poetry was being written and posted on blogs (weblogs). And not only written, read. Many poets have a huge following, their blog comments stretching over many pages. I began posting a few of my own poems, and quickly built up my own following.
I started to think that it would be nice to actually get my work into print. That is not as easy as it sounds. Poetry doesn’t sell, or so the powers that be say. Well, I decided to prove the doubters wrong. I would do for the other poets on MySpace what I was thinking of doing for myself. At that point the idea for Copeland Books was born. I would invest a small sum in producing a poetry anthology and website, cut out all the middle men, including Amazon who take 60% of the book price, and see what happened.
It took just four months for the first book to be launched.
It has been great fun working with the MySpace poets, and bringing this project to fruition has been a triumph. The publishing learning curve has been steep, practically vertical, but so rewarding, and I am now ready for the next challenge.
I believe that modern poetry has drifted dangerously far from the common reader and admire work which is technically accomplished, has powerful images, and appears to mean something. Copeland Books aims to publish such work, thereby inspiring a new generation of poetry lovers.
|
|
