Idea time: House of Sevenlings book

Well, I have been having ideas while being sick. Quite a few of them, in fact.

One of the better ones (I think!) is that I have a notion of putting together a slender volume of sevenling poetry, with an introductory text explaining the form and how it's done. I do have a few sevenlings myself to include, but ideally I would rather this wasn't All About Me - I'm envisaging it as a book about, and a homage to, the form. I think it might be a fun project, and maybe of interest to other poets and to teachers looking for poetry resources. If it worked really well, I might do a follow-up on villanelles and kyrielles, maybe.

I'm thinking in terms of doing it as both an ebook and a print-on-demand edition via Blurb. To get it to happen, I'll need:

- cover art
- 25-30 good sevenlings
- the introductory essay
- a wodge of time to edit, lay out, and make it happen

I'm lucky that I can afford to outlay a bit to get this happening, given that there is no upfront print cost to be met. I'll get in touch with a couple of clever designer types I know to organise a simple cover design, which I'll be able to pay for without drama.

What I'm wondering is, would it be better to offer contributors a flat fee to use their poems, or a percentage of sales? I am envisaging a pricepoint of $4 for the ebook and maybe $6 for the print version (with the POD fee, that's about $2.10 to publisher). If I went flat fee, I could afford to spend $50 per poem to buy up to 10 good poems. If it was a percentage, people would probably only see a few cents per sale, which could very well NEVER add up to $50.

So, the main things I am interested in, before I pursue this idea and register for GST and all that good (not good) stuff, are:

1. Which payment model do you think would be better?
2. Where would you look, if you were me, for contributors?
3. Is this a really dumb idea??

Have at it...