Guidance for Publishing a Poetry Book

I'll let others answer your questions about publishing.

Since you want to combine the poems as a book eventually, you could post it here as a book if you like. You can post individual poems under the Poems section but that becomes unwieldy for 100 poems (see below). For 10K words, I believe you'll need about 31 points to post all that as chapters, which on this site equates to posting about 4-5 chapters of a typical fiction book. Totally doable. If you post each poem as a chapter, you'll eventually end up with 100 or so chapters, which is the limit to how many chapters you can post per book. Anyone who has ever hit that limit simply starts a second book here and keeps going.

Fyi, the reason having 100 posted poems becomes rather unwieldy is that the site doesn't give any indication to reviewers who visit your portfolio (part of your profile) which of your poems they've already read. If they can't remember, they'll have to click on each poem to determine whether they did or not. Memorable poem titles would definitely help in that case. If they read them in the order you post them, then it's easy since they'd simply read the next poem in your portfolio.

If you choose to post your poems as a book, be sure you have the word Poems somewhere in the title so people can see at a glance that that's what it is. Normally, poetry fans look for poems under the Poems section of the home page, so you may need to inform fellow poetry writers that you're posting under books/chapters. Any connections you have to others will automatically let them know via email that you posted another chapter, assuming they haven't disabled email notifications.

However, you should know that the points math for poems differs from books. I believe poems pay you more points per word reviewed but also cost more to post under Poems. Since you'll probably be reading and reviewing poems, the difference in math between the two types of works means it should be fairly easy to accumulate points from reviewing poems and use them to post chapters.

Regardless of which section of the home page you post to, be sure not to include internet when choosing how widely you want to make the posted work visible. Professional publishers won't publish something that's already available for free on the net.

Clear as mud?
Hope that helps.

Let me see if I can scare up a few people to answer you. The number of views can be misleading since search engines regularly index the forum content. The best way to network here is to see who has posted poems in the past six months or so (since the early October server/backup crash) and then begin reviewing their work and/or send them connection requests and ask if they'd like to trade reviews. I don't believe anyone lost their work except one or two who were using this site as the only repository of their recently written work, who shouldn't have. I personally lost recent forum posts, but I keep my manuscript(s) offline in Word. Our site admin gave everyone enough points to re-post their work if that's what they wanted.

One solution re the low site payments is to see if you can combine some of them in some logical grouping to make bigger chapters. If not, stick with posting them as individual poems, though consider prepending a number to the title of each poem and/or pick memorable poem titles (e.g., 001 - Ode to the End of the World!). Any poem titles you've already used/posted can be renamed easily enough using the site's edit functionality in case you want to prepend a number to each title.

Another option if you don't get enough feedback here is to check our sister site, Booksie.com. It's newer, with new functionality, and I'm virtually certain it supports poems there as well. Not sure how much their forums get used, though. They do not use a points system at present, so the idea is to build a network of fellow authors who give the kind of detailed feedback you're looking for, and trade ongoing reviews with them without worrying about collecting points for posting. The effort is generally the same: you post poems (for free) and develop a network of people who consistently trade reviews with you.

One way to toot your own horn is to review others and ask them in the closing comments to review your poems and that you're looking to network with authors with whom you want to trade ongoing reviews. We'll call that the hit-them-over-the-head approach, which I sometimes use too.

If other sites to which you've posted have a paywall, then it should be fine to leave them up, at least for now, although check the site's policies regarding copyrights of posted work. If necessary, add a copyright notice to each poem. TNBW does that automatically, although that doesn't stop bad actors from re-posting your work elsewhere if they gain access to it. That can happen to anyone, including famous authors, whose books are in great demand. There's no foolproof way to do it though, except stick with well-established pay sites and add copyright notices. You always have the option to self-publish, of course. Consider looking up desirable publishers and agents and ask them about their policies. It's a given these days that most authors use a pay site to help them workshop their stories before submitting them to agents or publishers.