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The BTS Broadcast: Anthony Watkins, aka UP

We still haven't figured the money thing out, except, for now, we seem to be able to survive and thrive without it. We still dream of paying the writers who entertain you.

 

We need four things from you:

1)     Share us with your friends, though obviously, a lot of you are
doing this already.

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2)      Send money so we can support the poets and story tellers you read here.

 

3)      Use our forums to discuss works, to suggest future ideas and generally create an active community here. Tell us what you like, what you hate, what you wish you were finding here, volunteer to help us create the features you like.

 

4)      Submit your work email us at: betterthanstarbucks2@gmail.com.

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--- From your humble publisher Anthony UP Watkins and the team

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                   HAPPY APRIL FOOL'S  DAY TO Y'ALL !

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On Sat. Apr 01, 2017 at 09:45:07AM -044 I received a Tele from a famous publisher, by the name of Anthony Watkins, codename UP.  It says 'paid by receiver'.  And I checked tele price from my little tele-comm calculator, it says 'priceless' for broadcasting cc: ALL.

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One Crazy Exciting Wonderful Year! For us, and for you!

 

What *YOU* Can Do?

 

I can't remember what made me do it. Maybe at the time, I was having a midlife crisis, and felt I had too much time on my hands. I honestly don't recall, but last May I published the first issue of Better than Starbucks, it was really a dummy issue. All the content was either my rants or my poetry, even my art, bless you all for having to look at that! And even my short story. I had no intention of creating an Anthony Only  edition, it was just that I wanted to have something to post to invite others to submit their work. And you did, thank goodness. At first, I had a little pocket money, so I paid out a few dollars, then I lost two jobs and my father as we moved from summer to winter, so the money ran out, but then we met the most amazing people.

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Well, I had known Kevin, our Haiku guru, as long as I have been a public poet (since 1995), but Vera and S Ye, came on board and have added dimensions and structure and vision and art to this venture in a way we could not have dreamed of. I even managed to drag Suzanne (my better half) into the poetry editing, which is a good thing, because I am first a poet, not an editor. Thanks to the generosity of the people at U Penn and Kelley Writers House and Al Filreis and ModPo, we have expanded into a more experimental side. As our slogan says, we have become not your ordinary poetry magazine, and for this I am very proud, though some days I look around and hardly recognize the place, but that is a good thing.

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If all Vera contributed was a good formal page and all S Ye gave us was lovely translations, we would have been richer for it, but both have embraced the day to day aspects of copy editing, interviewing, web design, SEO, adding and maintaining new features, so that we are becoming sharper and sharper and in less than one year (May 2017 will be our 1st anniversary) , our readership has exploded from less than 1000 visitors per month to over 8000 for the March issue! In fact, March was seen by more readers than all our previous issues combined! This means we are doing something right. We hope to continue to add features and improve existing ones in ways that will allow us to serve more and more readers.

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