Publisher meets poet — a short story

*****Publisher meets Poet*****

Their eyes meet. It is love at first sight, thinks the poet. I'm going to get published! I wonder will it sell thinks the publisher.

But the publisher had fallen in love too and decided to go ahead knowing poetry was not the kind of thing the booksellers and distributors he sold to wanted and orders would be slim.

Are you famous he asked the writer.
No.
Oh dear, thought the publisher.

When he was trying to fall asleep at night the very hard questions kept raising their ugly heads: Was his business actually just a hobby? A charity? A non-profit? Why was he doing it?

So he went to the online, the thing that hadn't existed when he was a young man (he had come of age in the seventies/early eighties — a terrible fashion decade) and asked the clever professor-search-engine (he hadn't a clue what the chatGPT thing was about) to find out if his business was really just a hobby.

And he found Josh Kaufman, a self-taught MBA guy who was able to tell him whether his business was a real business.

And the writer slept soundly, smiling sweetly to herself, dreaming in rhyme.

(pictured — my notes from The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman — and here is a brilliant video explaining it all)