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Arts and Humanities Commons

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Portland State University

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

2018

Book industry -- Digital humanities

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Instapoetry Matters, Kathi Inman Berens Nov 2018

Instapoetry Matters, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Why do fans of Instapoetry buy printed versions of exactly the same poems they can get in the Instagram app for free? Why buy what they already have?

The answer to this question wends through immigration offices and CreateSpace automated book publishing software, through an ocean of likes, reposts, hashtags and comments, and plants a flag onto bestseller lists with such unambiguous force that almost half (47 percent) of poetry books sold in the United States in 2017 were written by Instapoets. Here’s the same awesome metric in different terms: twelve of 2017’s top twenty bestselling poetry books -- 60% …