Blazevox Scandal Has Me Thinking About Poetry Sales (and Book Sales in General)

So yesterday this bizarre and frankly fascinating thing happened while I was out blissfully walking around giant cedars and gasping at local waterfalls (Weeks Falls and then Snoqualamie Falls) and generally ignoring all poetry-related business…

A little press called Blazevox sent out some letters telling authors their books had been accepted but they needed to pay a $250 fee for them to be published. Certainly not the first or last time such a thing had happened, but it rubbed some folks the wrong way, then those folks blogged about it, then there was a lot of fighting on Facebook, then Blazevox’s editor (who, among other things, really needs to run spell check on his professional correspondence, if he learned nothing else from the blowup – really, poets are super bitchy about typos) announced on their web site that he was closing down the press.

So, my problem with the whole discussion was how the editor – and lots of other folks – made the assumption from the beginning that they can’t make any money from poetry or poetry books, and that that’s just a given. Hmph. I don’t think it’s a given. If maybe the press researches some marketing techniques, or does a little more PR work, maybe their books will sell better. Most poetry presses do very little in terms of trying to market their books. Those who make even a little effort probably have slightly better sales. Yes, I know Borders just went under – also from bad management decisions – and that e-books outsell paper books – and I know that poetry has never been terribly profitable. But there’s some weird elitist undertones to the conversation, as in, “Those silly masses of people out there will never be capable of liking or understanding poetry, so we need to get our support from the writers,” which really doesn’t make any sense to me. Why do we assume more people can’t or won’t like poetry IF THEY ARE EXPOSED TO IT CORRECTLY. Which means, not by an English teacher who hates poetry already who grudgingly makes students write terrible sonnets and teaches them about some eighteenth century dead guy, but, you know, real contemporary poets who are fun and enjoyable to read and don’t make you want to rip your own eyes from your head. I think Matthea Harvey is awfully fun to read, and would be for any random high school kid or college kid, and Denise Duhamel too. A lot of my friends write poetry that’s fun to read, fun to hear, fun to perform. The question is, why aren’t more poets (and poetry publishers) more ambitious about getting poetry out to more people who aren’t already poets or poetry lovers? A non-poet friend of mine who was a former VP of marketing at a Fortune 500 company asked me, so what do poets do to, you know, get the word out about their work? Well, I answered timidly, we wait til a college asks us to come out and read, and sometimes we read for free at coffee shops and little bookstores. Needless to say, she was not impressed with this plan – it’s not very practical if you want to really reach people who don’t already love poetry. So what should we be doing?

Also, for the record, my two small presses (bless you, Steel Toe Books and Kitsune Books) never asked me for money to publish my books. If you are a beginning poet and you don’t know this, there are publishers out there who will not ask you for money and will still publish your book. Yes, contest fees are a reality – but there are presses that still have no-fee open readings. And the way to help support them? It is to buy their books now before they go under. So, the rallying call is: if you like books and poetry, buy some books! From publishers who support their authors and don’t ask them to incur expenses themselves! Encourage your friends and family to go to some poetry readings, fall in love with poetry, and buy books themselves. I took my seventeen-year-old brother (and his gang of scary-looking-punk friends) to a Louise Gluck reading once, and he still has his signed copy of Meadowlands. You never know what’s going to connect with readers.