Who here has published?

I've only had a short story published so no help there but I did want to say good luck with your novel, would be great to see a fellow ABC-er rise to fame :)

Is poetry often harder to get published than a novel? or even just creative writing, Im guessing there has to be a aduience for the poet before they would publish, or would they publish and find an audience?

Poetry is not difficult to get published in a small magazine but as a book it's almost impossible - unless you publish it yourself. You should submit as much as possible to these magazine first and establish your name in the poetry community. Good Luck! There are many ABCtalers who have been published - most notably Drew Gummerson, Richard Aronowitz, Tim Claire, Joe Dunthorne and John Osborne as novelists and Alison Dunne, Eddie Gibbons and Joe Dunthorne (again!) as poets. We do have some very fine talents on here - as easily as many again who are either close to being published or very much deserve to be so.

I'm not sure it's really almost impossible to get a poetry book published. It's almost impossible to get a poetry book by one of the four 'commercial' publishers of poetry in the UK: Cape, Chatto, Picador, Faber. But my hunch is that getting poetry - if your poetry is vaguely competently written or better - by a small poetry press is far easier than getting a vaguely competently written literary novel published. There's certainly a huge amount of poetry being published by lots of publishers: http://www.poetrylibrary.org.uk/publishers/ The reason for this is that the financial risk involved in publishing poetry is much smaller. Of course, it's less risk with no chance whatsoever of significant financial return for either the publisher or the poet. Most people (with a few exceptions) who - through a combination of teaching, readings, residencies and book sales - are full time poets would be ecstatic to make over £1000 a year from sales of their books. And your just as unlikely to get a poetry book published through an unsolicited submission as you are to get a novel published. Tony is right about establishing a reputation. Magazines are only one way for doing that, though, and there's a variety of opinions on which is best. If you live in area - such as London - where's the lots of poetry readings, that's a good route in.

I have had poetry published in small mags, anthologies and some competition success. As Bukh points out, full time poets would be more than happy with a £1k income on books and that is too small amount of money for me to invest my time in such endeavour, even if I felt I were good enough to warrant inflicting a book upon poetry readers. Of course it is not just about money but sites like this are adequate means of me getting my stuff read by a small audience and has the added bonus of feedback. I also write non-fiction/ academic pieces which pay better ($100 usd per article on average) and further my career (which is not in writing). Sadly, the older I get, the more it is finances which dictate the big decisions in life. jude

The thing about niches is that only one author can fill them on a large scale. All the later copycats who pile into the genre don't usually do so well. Mummys and Swampmen are too close to Vampires I reckon. What about an American version of Alex Rider, the teenage spy? There's probably just enough space in the US Market featuring the FBI instead of MI6.