Poetry Presses Answer Your Burning Questions, Part 2

Jane’s Boy Press: Visibility is an issue. If you walk into a Target or a Walmart, they aren’t going to stock poetry unless it’s on the Times Bestseller List. This means going to dedicated bookstores, which still are often focusing on the most popular and classical poetry, and not picking up some of the less obvious choices for their shelves. If you find an independent bookstore that knows their niche, you’ll find a goldmine of wonderful books to read. But you usually have to search pretty hard or go directly to publishers’ websites or know what it is you’re trying to find.

 Another New Calligraphy: Promotion is a definite struggle, and one I commonly see other small publishers lamenting. It’s easier than ever to share your work with the world, which is incredible from an evolutionary standpoint. It just makes standing out even more difficult, a problem I’m sure will increase exponentially in the future.

 Unsolicited Press: What we are seeing is the effects of vanity publishing. Authors submit and when we talk contracts, they want to know how much to pay. They also want to know when they can provide their cover art. They want to decide everything down to the size of the font. These are all signs that they’ve been through vanity publishing of some sort. They don’t realize that they paid a publisher and that’s why they maintained ALL creative control. It can be a shock to them to find out that publishing doesn’t work that way. When we come across these writers, we say this: everybody in the publication of a book has a role, and the writer’s role is to write, not to format the book, not to make the cover…we have layout experts and designers who complete those tasks. That’s not to say that we don’t make every step of the process a conversation because we do, but we must also remember that an author is always too close to the work to make final decisions on a book’s development.

For the future, I see this getting worse. 

 Damaged Goods Press: Small press poetry does not make money. It’s a labor of love for so many presses, and Damaged Goods is no exception to that. Even though poetry is on the upswing in popularity, it is still a marginalized form of craft and not taken as a seriously (publicity-wise) as fiction and nonfiction work. I don’t really see this changing anytime soon, especially since we can’t all be Andrews McMeel Publishing, the super popular press that released Rupi Kaur’s NYT Bestselling poetry books. 

 Prolific Press Publishing: With the advent of cheap publishing platforms like KDP and Ingram, we have found it challenging to draw a bright line between traditionally published poets and self-published poets. We’re in the publishing business, and it’s genuinely hard for us to tell the difference sometimes, particularly as platforms now allow writers to brand themselves as their own publisher by way of an ISBN imprint.

If we are having trouble navigating these new waters, others are surely having the same troubles. The question for our company is this: If someday readers no longer recognize a legitimate difference between full publishing and self-publishing, what will that mean for Prolific Press?

It’s an interesting question, particularly as it has always been, and remains today, a prestigious accomplishment to be traditionally published. This is the currency that makes professional publishing possible.

To complicate these distinctions, some presses have very misleading practices, requiring writers to pre-sell books or otherwise guarantee sales. Those are obviously vanity presses, but they blatantly lie to writers by insisting they “aren’t a vanity press, and don’t publish everyone”, and this predatory atmosphere is not only deceptive but serves to confuse writers, often derailing their chances at success later on. After all, publishing houses know the worst offenders in the publishing industry, and when those names show up in a writer’s biography, many publishers simply reject work they might otherwise have accepted because they don’t want to risk tarnishing their own image by publishing a writer who has a relationship with a vanity press.

For now, we have a challenge to ensure Prolific Press stands apart from the pack, both in quality and integrity. I think we have, do, and will continue to, but the moment any company takes their reputation for granted, mediocrity will surely set in. For our part, we work harder than we have to, provide more than we promise, and always strive for perfection. I think that we can maintain our edge if we never compromise on those values.

 Sarabande Books: Funding is key. Once upon a time the Mellon Foundation and the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Fund offered sizable grants to independent nonprofit literary publishers. Some of this money went towards special projects, but there was a bit leftover for operating expenses, too. The NEA is currently the most reliable and generous granting we’ve experienced. And there have been difficult moments in the past when even that was in danger.

 dancing girl press: Because everyone is running presses mostly as a labor of love, it’s hard to keep momentum and funds to keep going. A lot of presses and publications have shuttered over the years because they didn’t have the money or the person-power to sustain them. Even university-affiliated presses have funding problems, where they might have been more stable in the past. I keep seeing articles about the resurgence of poetry’s popularity and hope maybe this means good things for the community.

 BlazeVox: There are many challenges we face daily, but we do it with a brave face. In poetry failure is built into the system so most of us are prepared for it to happen, and when it does, failure is found to be momentary. Success for a poet is found in a finely written book that is well designed. Everything else is out of our control. We strive for a good publicity campaign that will help the book receive reviews. We hope that readers find our books and they enjoy not only the words but also appreciate the book-shaped box in which the poems arrive. We already know that books sales in poetry are slim. That may be the largest challenge we face. Not just for our press but also for all other presses and distributors who endeavor to bring poetry to the public. It is a challenge we accept wholeheartedly. I think that this will always be a challenge to anyone who publishes poetry, be that today or one hundred years from now. But we don’t find this kind of concern troubling; it is the nature of poetry.

Redbird Chapbooks: Big picture we face the typical structural challenges – financial constraints and resource scarcity – that every organization faces.   

Some of our current considerations include pricing, reliance on volunteers, and risks of plagiarism/copyright infringement.

There is a limit to what a reader will pay for a book of poetry. Costs are increasing, margins are shrinking, but at what price does a reader choose not to purchase a book? And does that price offset enough of the costs?

When Red Bird was founded, we made some conscious decisions around accessibility and author compensation. We didn’t want reading fees to be a barrier preventing authors from having their collections considered. The founding members were finishing up our MFAs together and all of us knew how quickly those fees added up in any given year. We also thought that chapbooks should be affordable so that audiences would be encouraged to purchase an author’s work. And we thought that authors should receive payment when their books sold. All of these became variables which play in to our pricing and our ability to sustain our operations. 

We have some amazing volunteers and I am so grateful for all that they do with Red Bird. There are hundreds of hours of work that go in to each title. We do what we can to share the responsibilities across a large group. That said, each and every one of us have other obligations vying for our time. Sometimes people need to step away, to pursue other things. An unexpected illness, the birth of a child, a major deadline at work – all of these things can take unexpected precedence and as a press we need to be able to react and to keep projects moving to honor our commitments. It requires strong communication between our team and our authors. And it requires flexibility.

Copyright infringement and plagiarism is another challenge in the industry right now. I’ve seen a lot of conversations online lately about a recent instance where a poet used several lines from other poets throughout a collection. The ethical and legal ramifications of copyright violations can be significant.

Litmus Press: Funding. Especially consistent government funding, which is always under threat.

 Dusie Poetics: I find a lot of what is often considered ‘hot’ is sometimes a click or bandwagon.  I would like the academy to have a more radically inclusive attitude. Must we all write a pained narrative? There is surely room for other forms that precede the page whether in tone, style or form—there is surely a place where the publish-ability on the account of a poet gives freedom for true experiment to occur (whether that is for success or failure—it is the process of which that can be most exciting).

 rinky dink press: Poetry is as much an industry of “performance” as it is “page,” so that’s something that we’re always trying to broach, and by broach I mean bridge. Phoenix may not have the most well-integrated poetry community in the country, but I’ve straddled the community/university line since the late 90s, and though I consider myself more community than university, we need poets who are willing to share the stage and the page, acknowledge their strengths and differences and bring all of those strengths to the table in order to grow the audience of readers and listeners. Poets have to be outside and inside, in the suburbs and in the heart of the city. We have to make poetry part of the vernacular in our communities again.