I need your help guys, and I need you to be honest as it could be a costly mistake if people just say 'go for it' being polite and don't follow through.
As you may know I produced the full set of poems and presented it to the HDA who kindly agreed to print copies for £2.50 and distribute using their admin staff and photocopy/binding facilities.
Take up has been slow but I can live with that. In terms of HDA use of resources, given there is little if any profit in doing it that way and certainly very limited marketing (although a big THANK YOU applies to the HDA for taking it on and putting it on the site and HDA Newsletter) I have been thinking about other methods of getting it produced and sold.
I was listening to Jeremy Vine on Radio 2 yesterday and he had an article about self publishing sites. In particular he focused on Grosvenor House Publishing and there was a lot of good feedback on how they work. For a fee of about £1,000 they will work with authors to produce printed copies of books and get them out into the public arena getting advertised on sites like Amazon.Com and Waterstones.
Lots of other companies do similar packages. I note Jimmy Pollard used Lulu but, as they are an American company, the feedback has come back a bit hit and miss in terms of UK users.
At a very rough calculation, I think if I could get it published through Grosvenor at £4.99 retail price it would make about £1 profit after print and retail costs. To that end it would take 1,000 copies sold to recover my costs.
I'm prepared to take a bit of a loss in order to get it out there but obviously I can't afford the full £1,000 hit

ANYTHING over the costs of producing etc (total profit after outgoings) would go to the HDA so if I sold more than 1,000 based on my rough costs it would be fantastic but I am a realist and know that could be years down the line
Here's where I need your help.
Over the next six weeks, could visitors to this site please take a look at some of the poems following the links on various posts further up this Thread and let me know if you think it's worthwhile persuing and, if published, would you be willing to buy when out there? I will also put up a link to a poem a day.
If I get 50 positive responses from individuals between now end September I will take a big leap of faith and go for it. If not, I will happily leave the status quo.
Whatever the case, I'd welcome comments in here or the TRIOND (Authspot)site who host my on-line poems and am very keen to have someone with a better grasp of grammar to spot the deliberate mistakes
Here's today's link:
http://authspot.com/poetry/curse-in-verse-the-test/