Category: Publishing

Inspiration/

Another three great poetry blogs

Thought it was about time I shared a few more blogs, one I’ve been following for a while and two that have come to my attention just recently.

Clare Pollard's blog
Clare Pollard’s blog

I’ve particularly been enjoying Clare Pollard‘s ‘poetic journeys’ – most recently through Kent, from Broadstairs and Margate to Canterbury and one of my favourite places, Dungeness. The journeys are part-travelogue and part-personal pilgrimage, illustrated with poetry extracts. Clare also blogs about everything from gardens and lullabies to writing children’s fiction, her own poetry and that of others, and her day to day life as a working poet. A rich and interesting read.

Surroundings - Rob Mackenzie's blog
Surroundings – Rob Mackenzie’s blog

Rob Mackenzie isn’t a prolific blogger, but he always seems to put an effort into his posts – so I guess he comes under the ‘I’ll only blog when I’ve got something interesting to say’ category of blogger. Quality not quantity. There are some neat posts here – Rob’s musing on the nature of celebrity, the music of David Bowie and the real truth about what a poem in the Guardian gets you. And check out the sidebar – his blogroll is phenomenal, and there are masses of links to poetry magazines & webzines, poets’ blogs and resources, as well as to his own poetry publications, articles and reviews. This must have taken a lot longer to compile than a few blog posts. Respect.

Very like a whale - Nic Sebastian's blog
Very like a whale – Nic Sebastian’s blog

I think I have Rob Mackenzie to thank for pointing me in the direction of Very Like a Whale.

Although the most recent posted is dated May 2013, don’t let that put you off. I was very excited to find this blog – not least of all because of Nic’s interest in nanopress publishing (“aka alternative poetry publication, with gravitas”) something I’d not come across before. See this post about what it is, and Nic’s interviews with three nanopress publishers.

And that’s not all, Nic has written a ‘ten questions’ series in which he poses key questions to people in the poetry biz. I have only read a couple of the interviews in the ‘Ten questions for poetry editors’ series, and there are about a dozen more to feast on. I am glutton for this stuff – good thing it has no calories. I dare you not to enjoy it.

 

Angst/

Getting poetry out there

Charles n Di mug

Charles n Di mugAs I sit down with a cup of tea in my favourite mug (pictured above – just an excuse to feature it, really! I inherited it from my mum, it used to be one of pair but the other got broken, and I’m so attached to this one I dread anything happening to it. It’s not as if I’m a raving royalist but I love the kitsch of it, so wonderfully lacking in irony, plus there’s just something touching about this reminder of Charles and Di in their youth, before all that stuff happened…) erm, where was I?

Anyway, I was just thinking about my fellow book group members who I’ll be seeing tonight, and how popular book groups seem to be, and why more people don’t read poetry .. the  perennial question! I was also thinking of a conversation I had earlier this week with Margaret Wilmot about her new pamphlet, published by the highly respected Michael Laskey at Smith’s Knoll, and the challenge of distribution and sales. I was also thinking of a blog post I read yesterday at Rack Press Poetry about Amazon listing pamphlets as ‘unavailable’ when they actually are (but not from Amazon).

There is so much intelligent debate around the issue of how to get more people reading and buying poetry. I enjoyed this recent post by Judi Sutherland, for example, and her ideas of what she would do if she were the ‘marketing manager for UK Poetry plc’.

Of course, the distribution issue is classic chicken-and-egg. Bookshops won’t stock poetry from publishers or authors they’ve never heard of – not just because they fear they won’t sell (they can always send them back) but because the valuable retail space they would occupy is more profitably allocated to yet more copies of the latest E L James or whatever. So bookshop browsers never come across any poetry books, don’t know even the names of any poets and therefore are never going to ask for poetry or poets.

I know this argument well, from my experience in the sports industry. In the 1990s, UK sports retailers were notoriously male-sport-oriented. Independent stores in particular were owned and managed by men. They refused to stock a decent range of women’s sports shoes, their argument being that ‘women won’t pay more than £30 for a paid of trainers’ or even that ‘women buy kids trainers because they go up to their size and are cheaper.’ It didn’t seem to occur to them that women were only buying those products because they had no choice, and didn’t know what else was available. Retailers wouldn’t take the risk, didn’t understand what female customers wanted and didn’t care about the product except in terms of SKUs (stock keeping units) and getting the highest turnover per-square-foot.

Getting retailers to stock women’s sports shoes took an awful lot of work: sales reps had to be educated and incentivised, demand had to be generated and demonstrated, point-of-sale material had to be funded together with other shared-risk schemes and special conditions, favours had to be called in. The manufacturer had to put their shoes on high-profile female athletes and use them in advertising. All before retailers would take a chance on women’s shoes. And we’re not talking about a tiny shoe manufacturer that the retailer had never heard of. This was Nike. (You may think things aren’t much different today but trust me, it’s better than it was.)

I don’t see how it can be any easier for a publishing niche such as poetry, especially considering the tragic state of retail in general right now. The excellent Inpress appears to do a great job on behalf of independent presses, getting poetry books into bookshops. But in general, retail does not take risks, and if I ever have a pamphlet to sell I won’t hold my breath for Waterstones or Foyles to stock it.

So can anything be done to stimulate demand? I think we have to devise more ways to get poetry onto the radar of what Judi Sutherland calls the ‘nearly theres’. I’ve always loved Poems on the Underground, for example. I’m not so keen on the watering down of poetry by harnessing it to something else ‘more popular’, such as bringing out a poet or two at a music festival. I worry that it may reinforce the association between poetry and song lyrics, when it would be nice to see them have an argument occasionally. But maybe that’s just me.

Perhaps all of us who are in a book group should introduce a volume of poetry when it’s our turn to choose, rather than a novel. Perhaps we can help get poetry into more public spaces – shop windows, noticeboards, on the backs of bar menus, on buses, on mugs. Perhaps we should think like old-style ‘interruption’ advertisers. A poetry short in place of one of those endless trailers before a film. How about some guerrilla poems left around town on tables or in shops – the knitters and crochet people do this very well! We need more (some!) poetry on TV – come on, film-makers, I can think of half a dozen ideas for a compelling poetry-themed programme.

OK my tea’s cold now, so rant over. Let me know your thoughts. Have we really tried everything? Is poetry destined to be forever a teeny drop in the publishing ocean?

Books/

Where my poetry pocket money has been going

poetry london

June 3rd and I think I’ve already blown my poetry pocket money for this month.

First of all I’ve subscribed to Poetry London which I’ve been meaning to do for ages, and I asked to start with the Spring 13 issue, which has resulted in both Spring and Summer issues arriving within days of each other. A feast!

Today I was reading John Field’s brilliant review of Ben Parker’s first pamphlet ‘The Escape Artists‘ from tall-lighthouse, and couldn’t resist buying it, being only £4. You can’t even buy a glass of wine for that in London. (By the way, if you haven’t already, do read Adele Ward’s impassioned blog posts about how we MUST buy directly from small publishers.)

Then today I entered the Mslexia poetry comp for the first time, having told myself I needed to enter some competitions this year, but only big ones otherwise it gets horribly expensive. And yes, I have also entered the Bridport – well, a gal’s gotta try! I did have a go at the Mslexia Pamphlet comp last year, but more for the experience of trying to put a pamphlet together than any thoughts of glory – there was none, anyway.

Maybe I’m feeling a bit more confident at the moment having had some good news recently, but nothing I’m able to blab about here, at least for the time being – sorry!

My blog’s seen a flurry of new readers after the lovely Abegail Morley linked to Poetgal from her own blog, The Poetry Shed.  If you haven’t read her powerful collection “How to pour madness into a teacup’ I can certainly recommend it, I found myself reading it in one sitting.

Books/

Dear poets: publishing is a business

out of print

I’ve been emailing with a poet friend today who drew my attention to this piece in the Guardian, about Salt’s decision to stop publishing individual poetry collections and to concentrate on anthologies. I know it’s been a big topic of debate this week. But something about the way it’s been reported makes me see red.

As a fledgling poet as desperate as anyone to be published by a good quality press (if I’m being honest)  I may be shooting myself in the proverbial foot here. But in my mind, publishing is a business, like any other – yes, I realise many small presses do it for love, which is perfectly possible if you have the means to do so, if you have a day job, don’t have staff or premises or bills to pay.  Don’t get me wrong – I love the small presses and am eternally grateful that poetry attracts so many selfless individuals.

But if you are in the business of publishing, you need to make a profit, or at the very least, cover your costs. And to make a profit, you have to sell books. The time when poets could hand that over to their publisher to worry about has gone. A publisher does not exist to nurture new talent or to give young upcoming poets their big break. A publisher can only do that if people keep buying the books. Which, considering how many people no longer even read books, let alone buy them, and given how easy it is now to self-publish, is not surprisingly an uphill struggle.

Of course the Guardian gave the piece a particular editorial slant (big clue being in the funereal photo of Carol Ann Duffy). Perhaps I’m just not knowledgeable enough to realise the dreadful consequences of all this. But the marketer in me says that for poets to come across in this light – complaining about how poets are being denied an outlet, and what a tragedy it all is – does nothing whatsoever for the reputation of poetry, or poets, in the eyes of the general public. You know, all those people who do still buy books (except poetry books).

Surely given the economic climate we should all be thankful that Salt hasn’t folded, or even that it hasn’t abandoned poetry publishing altogether.

Rather than worrying about who’s going to publish our slim volumes we should be thinking about the real issues – how can we help regenerate interest in poetry? How do we reach out to all those people who love reading but can’t stomach poetry? How do we embrace changes in how the written or spoken word is consumed? How do we help publishers sell more books? 

Come on guys, we’re in this together. If we can just be a bit less passive and a bit more proactive we might win more non-poet friends over. And then who knows what might happen.