From the Desk of Devin Jeanel February 10, 2008: Starlite is entering a new world... Publishing. Publishing is exciting. There is no other feeling like when you hold your first book. I believe every Starliter needs to have a place to publish their works into book form without tricks and without scams. I plan to make that possible. As with most things we will have to crawl before we can walk.

Now lets start painting... For 2008, I want to publish at least two books in what I'm calling The Best of Starlite Series. I understand that the advertising dollars are not even covering Starlite's base expenses, but I feel this is important. Important enough in fact, that if necessary, I will fund the project entirely out of my own pocket. The bottom line is that I feel this is great way for us to provide a valuable service. These first two books will be compilations of poems from Starliters. As the poet, you of course own all of the rights and would need give your permission for the material to appear in our book.

Lets take a look at the first two books for 2008.

The first book will be a collection of poems written for/about Albert Victor. I would absolutely love to have this book printed by Albert's Birthday. I would suggest that we give the first copy to his brother Keith on this date. Albert was taken from us at a young age. However, his memory will last for a lifetime. This book will hold his legacy forever. By capturing our thoughts in the printed book, they are frozen. I would further propose that all profits (if there are any) be donated to the American Lung Association in Albert's name.

The second book idea is a book of love poems. Starliters are very romantic. I have read some powerful material on our site. I would love to capture that feeling in a book. There will be a lot of steps to this process. The first question will probably be, "how is a poem picked for the book?" I feel the answer to this question is, the Starlite Poets should decide. In the near future, you'll see a new format of challenge/contests appear. In this format, the style of picking the winner changes from being picked by the host to being decided by popular vote of Starliters. It will not only make the host's job much easier, but it also gives us a very fair way of selecting a top poem. There will be lots of new challenges/contests also. Some challenges/contests will be open to older poems. Some challenges/contests will require you to nominate a poem by someone else.

This new format for challenges/contests will provide us with a lot of capabilities. The system is integrated. This allows us to automatically place the winner of all the different challenges onto the front page. Right now, I could not tell you who won all the challenges last week. I would have to go inside of each forum and read through it. For everything going to this new system, that will change. The winner will receive recognition system wide for their accomplishment. At the same token, I do not believe in embarrassing the people that don't win. I will not give out where a poem placed. As far as everyone knows, their poem was second place and lost by one vote.

Whenever you enter the publishing world there is another area that becomes very important. When you win a challenge/contest, you have a good poem. Do you want to make it GREAT? I would like to work with Starlite to build a mechanism to provide constructive criticism. If this is implemented, each poem that wins will be given the opportunity to go through a peer review process. I say opportunity because the poet will have the option to participate or not. If they select to skip this process, then their win still gives them the right to be in the book.

But, how do I see the peer review process working? At current, I'm seeing this as a small group of peers who will focus a lot of time and energy on this poem to provide raw and unbiased suggestions of how the poem can be the best it can be. I will be sitting in on each of these peer review sessions in the beginning to set the tone and ensure that people get what they need. It's hard to hear your poem being torn apart. I know this all so well. My last book went through 16 versions before it was published. I also know that it is how the suggestions are made that makes all the difference. This is another service that I would like to offer to Starlite in the future. For now, since this is so time consuming, I plan to offer it only to the challenge/contest winners. In the end, after all the reviews and all the suggestions, the poet is still the poem's owner and will make the call on whether any of the suggestions are needed.

These two books are just the beginning. In 2009, I would like to do even more of the series, The Best of Starlite. I would also like to start publishing individual books for Starliters. If you have over 300 poems, and you would like to see it in book form, I would like for Starlite to be the place to do that for you. We have to work out all the details of course. Like I said, we have crawl before we can walk.

I hope I have painted a picture well enough to allow you to see my vision. I am excited about opening this world up to Starliters to grow and be read.

Remember I LOVE YOU STARLITERS !!!

Devin Jeanel
Starlite Poetry


Return to Devin's Corner Index Page