Poetry Presses Answer Your Burning Questions, Part 3

Unsolicited Press: If we could increase the exposure of poetry books on the front lines through active selling, it’s possible more Americans would consider reading poetry. We worked with a distributor in the past that was clearly advising their sales reps to push fiction and nonfiction over poetry. For example, we learned that a buyer for a reputable indie bookstore had heard of all our forthcoming fiction titles, but wasn’t informed of our poetry collections. And when more than half of the catalog is poetry, that is very concerning. It’s scary to think sales reps aren’t trained to sell poetry.

Another New Calligraphy: I wonder how technology could be better harnessed in the writing process. In most cases, the internet is simply used to recreate traditional journals on our screens. What would more dynamic publication look like? How could digital resources be used to collaborate or provide feedback on a larger scale than we know today?

Dusie Poetics: I think the industry could be improved with a greater selection of voices. Voices of color, minorities, LGBTQ+, women are all underrepresented as well. There was a great write-up in the Chicago Review several years back by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young called “Numbers Trouble” that illustrates some of this struggle. Numbers do not lie and this survey could certainly be done again in way of minority groups to identify that the struggle to have alternate views represented is still very real.

Black Lawrence Press: It’s always a struggle to get people to pay attention to poetry the way they pay attention to fiction. I think one of the best ways to change this is to have people start reading more poetry in the classroom—both in K-12 and in college.

Kelsay Books: It is a complicated business, and most publishers walk a fine line. To produce quality books, pay staff, company bills, maintain professional standards, marketing, along with earning a living—it all needs to be carefully balanced.

I think if students learn to write poetry in high school, they might have a greater appreciation for it later on in life. That would lead to more sales and help generate greater overall drive for poetry in bookstores. Poetry is alive and well with poets, but the average person on the street doesn’t gravitate toward purchasing it.

Damaged Goods Press: Poetry publishing could be improved by simply having more funding opportunities available for small presses. Right now, the contest and “pay-to-play” model is unsustainable and forces writers to shoulder the burden of submissions costs. Money should flow towards writers, not away from them, and this causes so many people to miss out on calls for submissions that might otherwise be a wonderful fit for their work. I think this is a challenge of small press publishing that is often discussed, but usually, nothing practical comes from it. This isn’t an indictment of small press publishers, but more so an indictment of how larger institutions make a habit of hoarding and monopolizing the resources that are available to the literary arts. Large presses should consider how their size and influence can amplify or harm small presses.

Sarabande Books: Poetry is finally, finally, selling. And its reach is much wider than before. This has been confirmed by Consortium, our distributor, and we, too, are seeing print runs that go beyond 5000 copies. More of the same I would say. If I had my druthers, there would be no returns. But that’s damaging to booksellers and would never happen in the first place. 

dancing girl press: I think just more readers would be great. More support, both financial and word of mouth. More reviews, more interest. More community. For poetry to taken as seriously as fiction as a genre, in terms of gaining new and interested readers. So many readers are scared off by poetry at an early age. As such, they never give contemporary poetry a chance, and might find it a completely different animal than what they remember.

Prolific Press Publishing: There are certainly many improvements to be made, but one really stands out to me because I’m both a writer and a publisher. To illustrate, consider Poetry Quarterly. This is a truly excellent poetry journal, but for all the years of successful publishing, only a handful of loyal poets (whom I have truly learned to love) buy every issue of the journal, regardless of whether their work appears in the issue. We have loyal readers, don’t misunderstand, but I’m speaking about the poets who submit their work to the journal.

Very few poets are interested in developing an ongoing relationship with a press. If they aren’t truly interested in the publication itself, one wonders why they selected that venue to submit to. The cold reality is that most hope to get published, add to their bio, and move on. It’s a sad state of affairs when one considers the alternative.

A loyal base of poets that have a working relationship with an editor, and a history of publication with a press, provides for a better experience for everyone involved. When recurring relationships are cultivated, the journal’s readers quickly begin to pick their favorite voices. Readers become more loyal. And writers, on the other hand, begin to build a readership in a market where any genuine readership is more than difficult to foster; it’s astonishing that more writers haven’t leveraged this reality.

Over the years, I’ve worked with thousands of poets. One thing I’ve learned is that almost all poets desire to acquire some readers that care. They want it more than money or a padded biography. Sadly, many poets express that they feel like they don’t have any regular readers—except friends and family—who care about following their work. Despite this vacuous state of affairs, those same poets tend to plod down the same path, year after year, submitting to journals they don’t read or care about, hoping this practice will take them somewhere new. Speaking for myself, I much prefer to have a connection with a small audience than no connection with a multitude of nameless, faceless, dispassionate one-time readers who really wouldn’t know my name if it were brought up over dinner.

Oddly, many writers boast about the quantity of journals they have been published in. Publishers know the truth. It’s more meaningful (successful) for poets to have a good working relationship with a handful of presses than it is to have a thousand hit and run encounters with one-time readers who don’t care about the voice of the poet. Moreover, as a publisher, when I see a bio that notes multiple publications by the same press (provided it’s a publication with integrity), then I can infer that the publisher liked working with the poet. I can appreciate that.

The industry could be improved if we focused on building legitimate readerships by cultivating closer relationships between poets and presses. And if I could offer poets some advice, I start with suggesting they pick a journal to support. Buy it, every issue from now until you die. Choose your favorite voices and let yourself become a fan of a few lesser-known poets you find via that publication. Write to the editor and express what you like about the poems, and what you could do without, but be more loyal than a Chicago Cubs fan, win or lose. And submit poems to the same journal. You’ll be better for it. That’s my take.

Redbird Chapbooks: I’ve been with Red Bird for seven years. Each year I see more presses and literary magazines close. There are less and less places for authors to publish their work. This naturally makes the publishing process more competitive, harder to break in to. 

There could be some real value in presses working together, promoting one another. It takes time but I think it’s important. One thing we try to do at Red Bird is to help promote our authors—this includes sharing news when they release new work with other publishers. This sharing helps readers support the authors they like and introduces audiences and authors to other publishers.  New readers may even learn of a title we published years ago that they may not have known about, having the potential to increase sales. It’s a sort of cross pollination, I guess, and based on the idea that we all do better when we all do better. 

Jane’s Boy Press: Much of it is about trying to train the buying public, and what we have going against us most often is that the way we have traditionally taught (and continue to teach) poetry—even at the collegiate level—does not open people up to wanting to seek out more poetry. When we teach fiction, we teach the classics, but we also introduce contemporary works. We do the same with drama. But with poetry, for some reason, we take the stance that the only poetry worth studying was written by white, straight men who died at least 100 years ago. You would think poetry was something like Latin—we can study it, but as a practice, it’s dead. If we could get classrooms to feature poets like Jan Beatty, Patricia Smith, Rachel McKibbens, and other vital voices that are making poetry alive and exciting right now, people would be much more excited about finding more poetry and seeking it out.

Rose Metal Press: More and more presses are becoming increasingly mindful of inclusivity and intersectionality in terms of who they publish, and we do our best to do that as well. The industry as a whole feels as though it’s improving in terms of its balance of whose books get to reach an audience, and we hope that trend continues so it’s not merely a trend but a standard. For instance, when we assemble anthologies, we proceed as carefully as we can to achieve a book that ends up balanced in terms of the gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and so forth of the authors in the table of contents, but we know there’s always room for more mindfulness and care on those fronts. 

Litmus Press: As far as the small, independent publishing industry—as opposed to the big 5—our real strength is in taking risks on work that is not highly marketable. We get to make choices that are not about our bottom line. And we need to take those risks and support each other in doing so, so we can continue to amplify the marginalized voices, the marginalized thinkers and cultural activists who are doing the real work of conceptualizing our present and our future. We also need to support the advancement of queer, poc editors and publishers in order to truly alter this landscape that is so traditionally white and straight.

rinky dink press: rinky dink press is largely run by a bunch of GenX punks (some of us with MFAs and PhDs, some without), so we’re doing this our way, which is the “we’ve been around the block” way, and we keep our price point low ($1 per microzine), and we put amazing poetry in the coolest package possible, and we hand-fold all of our zines (100+ at a time), and we print our zines on a university copier. What I’m saying is that regardless of the way you run your small press, the operation is going to be challenging unless you have substantial funding and a team of dedicated interns and editors. Or unless you get really creative and buck the status quo. This is art, and we need more free-thinking and more accessibility—economic and racial and cultural.

BlazeVox: Every year provides new opportunities for our editors to reflect on the previous year and consider where improvements can be made. This year for example all of our numbers are up. The journal reached a new milestone in the number of readers and we were very lucky to publish some fine fiction and poetry books, so it was a stellar year. Each poetry press has goals unique to their publication in mind when it comes to seeking improvement. But as an industry as a whole, if poetry can be considered industrialized, I think we are doing quite well in every major area of development one could hope for.

The Poetry Foundation and the Academy of American Poets, along with hundreds of other literary institutions are very active in promoting everything poetry: the writing of poems, the reading of poetry, appreciation of poetry, appreciation for exceptional poets, and so on. This is happening in local communities as well as the nation at large. In the past decade, more and more people are writing poetry as a means to express individuality, creativity, and dissent within the current political climate. The readership of writings by all poets has led to the widespread demand for books by poets of color, LGBT+ poets, women poets from around the globe, and poets with disabilities.

It is really a fantastic time to be a publisher and a reader. The production of books has become easily available to anyone with computer at hand. This means that more and more people are able to self-publish or even begin a small press on their own so that they can jump-start the energy of their own writing as well as the work of their fellow poets among their community. We have a great deal of positive outreach, so it may seem that poetry takes up a small section in the bookshop, its energy is on the streets. But your question was on how to make improvements, and any suggestions I would offer would be to ask everyone involved in poetry to keep this energy flowing and pass this love of poetry as an inheritance to the next generation of readers and writers.