You are reading what may be one of my final posts at this
blog.
I've proposed retiring from the daily grind before, but with
a longtime goal in sight, I'm seriously considering laying down my pen... or at
least taking a long hiatus.
The goal was to write
2,751 5-liners, thus surpassing by one the number which appear in "The New
Limerick," ©1977. Edited by Gershon
Legman (with but a few of his own limericks,) it contains over 1,000 more
entries than does his "The Limerick," ©1964 with its 1,739 poems.
Assuming I quit or go on sabbatical, I may pursue the idea of publishing one clean and one dirty book of around
500 limericks each. Since my
experience with last year's "Limericks in the Time of Trump" hasn't
been very positive, I'm not sure why I am eager to lose more money.
That book cost around $2,000 to publish and in eleven months has sold only
218 copies thru Amazon. We four authors
have privately sold some, but with only word-of-mouth advertising, the book
“laid an egg” monetarily. Even if we’d
had the money, where would we have advertised?
If I've learned one thing in my 6+ years of blogging, it is
this: Never over-estimate the knowledge and sophistication of your
readers! I have told hundreds of
personal and email acquaintances about this site. When I've later asked their impressions, more
than half have replied, “I had to Google for all the fancy words and obscure
references you use.” Evidently, most
readers don’t want any education with their entertainment.
Another thing I’ve learned is that the number of readers who
recognize and appreciate scansion, real rhymes, and cleverness is far
smaller than I had thought. Since I
refuse to “dumb down” my work, publishing it for any reason other than
self-satisfaction is probably a fool’s errand.
Stay tuned…
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! Don't stop doing this! I promise I won't take you for granted anymore! I had a plan to enlighten a large number of readers by directing them toward your talent, but I left it on the backburner for too long. I think I will blow the dust off that plan, and put it into action. (I'll explain later what it is). In the meantime, keep an eye on your Statcounter within the next week or two, and you'll see what I mean. Hang in there, crazy punster munster topnotch limericist guy!
ReplyDelete(But do go through with the book