Self publishing?

[billy]

Self-publishing has become inexpensive and relatively painless. What are your thoughts on self-publishing?

[Aish]

How interesting. Leanne and I discussed this topic recently.
In 2005 after publishing a handful of times in an indie-type magazine I garnered a publishing contract the traditional way. It has been nothing but problems, arguments, and stress - with zero finished product. Until recently I had considered self publishing the ultimate in vanity and poo'd off anyone who had done so. I came into contact with someone I consider talented who chose to self publish, and in light of creative differences with my publisher I have to say I'm slowly changing my mind about that, especially since most of the marketing was expected to be generated by me or someone I paid.
I still intend to attempt to publish my novels through traditional channels, but as far as poetry is concerned self publishing doesn't seem all that different to me (at this point in time) than posting it online for others to embrace, sneer at or steal.

[billy]

will respond later hehe, (nice post Aish)

[Leanne]

Not for me mate.

I appreciate that there have always been poets who create their own chapbooks, and I think there's a definite niche for some of them as many I've seen have been hand-stitched or otherwise crafty little pieces, some even leather-bound, more like objets d'art and quite unique, showing that a lot of time and effort has gone into their creation. This is very different to the current trend of desktop publishing something that's never been edited or even proofread and sending it off to some print-on-demand place (or worse still, Publish America!) so that the only successful "published authors" are the ones who are the best at marketing themselves. Unfortunately, this is true of more products than just books -- the flashiest advertising, or the fastest talkers, are the ones who make the money.

To those people, I would wish all the best of luck if only they were not churning out such poor quality, first-draft writing and ensuring that the popular view of poetry remains one of general disinterest and a conviction that it's only a pastime for the self-indulgent, overly emotional or very pretentious.

[abu nuwas]

I think that two things are essential for poetry to prosper: 1) Quality, quality, quality, quality; and 2) Marketing.

What quality is, of course, one can dispute: but it must have the ability to attract a fairly broad swathe of people. It will be somehwere between the much-despised 'Hallmark' and the pretentious clap-trap of which Leanne speaks.

One may regret the lack of a publisher as 'gatekeeper' but if notwithstanding, in some way, the quality is there, then that ceases to be relevant.

If these things can be lined up, I doubt it makes the slightest difference how a book is issued. But those things are a big ask.

[Leanne]

Indeed, I have no great love of the publisher either, but at least that third party acts as a quality filter of sorts (though whoever let The Da Vinci Code slip through the quality net needs a good smacking with something made of cast iron).

I expect I would have no real objection to self publishing if authors would at least work in conjunction with editors to produce something of high quality, text-wise at least. Let's face it, today's publishing market is not kind to poetry -- unless said poet has shagged a footballer, been acquitted of a major crime or been lost on a hiking trip and hacked off a bit of his/her body.

It will still not be something I participate in, but I'd be more willing to support it if people took some real pride in their work as opposed to vanity.

[billy]

you really do hate the da vinci code dontcha hehe.

self publishing, the vanity press side of it i think is based more on ego and need than quality. that said some great poets may self publish. though i'm not sure i know of any. on the flip side i think self pulishing to create hierlooms, coffee table books and presents to loved ones a great thing. chap books as leanne mentioned for self and a few friends are a great way of archiving your poetry. one of the reasons a real life editor works is that often they trash the trash poetry before it gets a chance to breath (though a lot in periodicals etc still gets through the net. the idea of being hard to get published arose because most poets at their best were pretty shitty now there is no gardener to pluck out the weeds. now when someone says "i'm a published poet" they often mean "i'm a self published poet" though they usually leave the word "self" out of the statement. i wonder why that is.

[abu nuwas]

A few questions come out of this. One, does the editor/publisher truly act as a worthwhile filter? There are so many poets -- and I am rarely able to wade through those in The Poetry Review which comes periodically -- I really wish that it would be like a page turner, but it is not. Likewise with most 'slim volumes'. There ought to be a marked shift between even the best poetry I see online, and the precious printed word -- but there is not, publisher or no. Little cliques abound, and pat each other on the back, and A publishes or praises B, and B returns the favour.

It is true that the press has become v Philistine-- the regular slots for poems no longer seem to exist. Did the poets become too abstruse? I don't know. Leanne left out one major category: when poets fall out among themselves. That is usually worth a few column-inches.

I can imagine a book of special paper, handmade, binding, pictures and so on. But it would still need that essential ingredient, quality, and if any were to be shifted, marketing. In the UK, the 'Poems on the Underground' have carved out out quite a niche -- it is hard, but do-able.

[Leanne]

does the editor/publisher truly act as a worthwhile filter? There are so many poets -- and I am rarely able to wade through those in The Poetry Review which comes periodically -- I really wish that it would be like a page turner, but it is not. Likewise with most 'slim volumes'. There ought to be a marked shift between even the best poetry I see online, and the precious printed word -- but there is not, publisher or no. Little cliques abound, and pat each other on the back, and A publishes or praises B, and B returns the favour.

This is a very good point. The editor/publisher has sadly become more entrepreneur than patron of the arts these days -- once all publishing houses would use the profits from their big sellers like cookbooks and pulp novels to subsidise the "literature", but now of course those profits subsidise their swimming pools and botox. For the most part, the poetry that gets published belongs to the people pleasers, thus published poetry has become pulp as well. And yes, there is an enormous element of backpatting and quid pro quo, it's all rather incestuous.

I suspect -- or rather, I'm quite certain -- that all my objections to self publishing would fall away if, before deciding that a manuscript is ready for publication, the author would just show it to a few impartial and reasonably well qualified individuals for scrutiny rather than acting on the say-so of mother-who-loves-everything-you-do.

[abu nuwas]

My nephew did Poetry in a Creative Writing degree. At the end, all the students produced little booklrts, self-published. I windered what the college thought they were about, but one look at the main man, a bumbling over-weight character who could have played the lead in 'The History Boys', and I knew there was no point even in making a polite enquiry. His real enthusiasm lay in translating a French poet, who, one might have thought, was not susceppptible to translation.

Nevertheless, I think times change, and change again, and a little publicity, a certain charisma, and bingo! Middle-brow it may be, but better that than nothing....

[Leanne]

Middle-brow would be a quantum leap from the current standards

[Aish]

does the editor/publisher truly act as a worthwhile filter? There are so many poets -- and I am rarely able to wade through those in The Poetry Review which comes periodically -- I really wish that it would be like a page turner, but it is not. Likewise with most 'slim volumes'. There ought to be a marked shift between even the best poetry I see online, and the precious printed word -- but there is not, publisher or no. Little cliques abound, and pat each other on the back, and A publishes or praises B, and B returns the favour.

This is a very good point. The editor/publisher has sadly become more entrepreneur than patron of the arts these days -- once all publishing houses would use the profits from their big sellers like cookbooks and pulp novels to subsidise the "literature", but now of course those profits subsidise their swimming pools and botox. For the most part, the poetry that gets published belongs to the people pleasers, thus published poetry has become pulp as well. And yes, there is an enormous element of backpatting and quid pro quo, it's all rather incestuous.

I suspect -- or rather, I'm quite certain -- that all my objections to self publishing would fall away if, before deciding that a manuscript is ready for publication, the author would just show it to a few impartial and reasonably well qualified individuals for scrutiny rather than acting on the say-so of mother-who-loves-everything-you-do.

If I decide to self publish I have zero qualms about letting you, Billy, Todd, Addy,AA, Jack, Abu, and probably Philatone have a major run at it - if any of you would be game.

Hell - why not start up our own little art press?

[Leanne]

If I decide to self publish I have zero qualms about letting you, Billy, Todd, Addy,AA, Jack, Abu, and probably Philatone have a major run at it - if any of you would be game.

Hell - why not start up our own little art press?

Such a wonderful dream... but having been there, done that, in a manner of speaking at least, that way lies nothing but heartache and poverty. Even more poverty than just writing poetry will leave you in

There must be a way though. Publishers are not prepared to take risks on poetry, but poetry desperately needs risk takers to drag it out from the depths of mediocrity and beyond... so if anyone has an amazingly brilliant idea, I'm desperate to hear it. There are so many deserving poets creating fascinating works out there, languishing in obscurity.

Certain cities around the world demand that any new developments allocate a percentage of their budget for public art -- sculptures and the like. I wonder how to get this pseudo-patronage idea to work for poetry and other neglected art forms?

[abu nuwas]

My sister is a painter. When she was at College, she would (in between riding her bike across massive and massively expensive, paints in the garden, prior to setting light to the same) sneer rather at painters whose work she deemed .chocolate-boxy. Life being the ironic bitch it is, she has found, (and I should say she paints beautifully) that people began to like, and buy, pictures of her red-haired daughter, Rosie, among the poppies at my later mother's house. For a while , she was trapped, as that was all her agent, representing Joe Public, wanted; one guy phoned from California offering $10,000 for a painting she had alrady agreed to sell for much less, having seen it on the cover of 'Country Life'.

Of course, she has moved on, but will still have to pkeep a weather-eye to the market -- what will sell, and what will not. Sometimes, the sea and the sky where she lives, satisfy both: sometimes Jou Public wants to see little boys in three-quarter length thousers, playing by the sea. A tad chocolate-boxy, perhaps.

The moral of all this is: how much could any of us, hand on heart, say was ready for market --any market? If there is no market, perhaps we more and more satisfy ourselves, and by so doing , make what we write even less marketable?

Ho

[Aish]

Such a wonderful dream... but having been there, done that, in a manner of speaking at least, that way lies nothing but heartache and poverty. Even more poverty than just writing poetry will leave you in

There must be a way though. Publishers are not prepared to take risks on poetry, but poetry desperately needs risk takers to drag it out from the depths of mediocrity and beyond... so if anyone has an amazingly brilliant idea, I'm desperate to hear it. There are so many deserving poets creating fascinating works out there, languishing in obscurity.

Certain cities around the world demand that any new developments allocate a percentage of their budget for public art -- sculptures and the like. I wonder how to get this pseudo-patronage idea to work for poetry and other neglected art forms?

We need a movement. A screaming minority who won't take no for an answer. A niche.

---

The moral of all this is: how much could any of us, hand on heart, say was ready for market --any market? If there is no market, perhaps we more and more satisfy ourselves, and by so doing , make what we write even less marketable?

Ho

I fully cop to writing to scratch my own itch.

[abu nuwas]

That makes entire sense. I have noticed you are not alone. Rob, who joined recently, has the same ambition-- although for him, it is very much a legacy thing, I think.

[Leanne]

On the other hand, is not the market created by what's available? We buy clothes according to "fashion", which is really just another word for "this is what the designers have decided you want this year" -- and the current obsession with reality tv/self help gurus/pretending you don't deserve to be on The Biggest Loser while you eat your five buckets of KFC/celebrity babies is really only based on the fact that there's nothing else of quality presenting itself. Or rather, being presented by the people who control the market. I won't speculate on possible political/social reasons for dumbing down audiences/consumers; suffice to say they exist, and one doesn't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see how keeping the public ill-informed with simplistic tastes benefits certain elements of society.

I know, largely from anecdotal evidence but there's a hell of a lot of it out there, that there remains a largely under-serviced market of people who do have sophisticated -- or not utterly primitive -- tastes, who do like to be challenged by what they consume, and who don't fit into the categories of pompous aristocrat or academic but who nonetheless wish to be entertained by more "cultural" pursuits. What I don't know is how to service that market, because if I did I wouldn't be moaning about how little money one can make out of poetry

[Aish]

I have a book buried somewhere written by a woman who runs a business helping other women make their dreams come true. Most of it is 'teach yourself to think outside the box' and 'never accept someone else's definition of you' type stuff all strung together and I never finished it, but I wonder if maybe there is a condensed chapter at the end with some magic formula for putting ideas into action?

There is always a tipping point. I think the main thing is getting material in front of people. If you can generate enough 'buzz' you're golden.

---

What if we simply planted our own rumor? What if we began by slipping something about the 'poetry explosion' into casual conversations? Rumors spread. People talk to other people. We might be able to generate our own internet hoax that boosts something instead of kills it. Poetry guerillas.

[Leanne]

For a while I was randomly dumping poems in people's letterboxes -- it generated quite a few hits for the website I was on at the time, or at least I'm going to take credit for it though I never did find out for sure I'd much prefer to do that sort of thing, or to provide a good resource for people to get themselves to a point where they can do something remarkable for themselves, but that's basically just because I'm lazy. I don't write poetry for personal credit or glory (which is just as well, I suppose, I'd be eternally disappointed!)

There's a rumour going around that The Pig Pen is a site that's really quite concerned with poetry... some even speak such things in derogatory tones, as if that's a bad thing... I'm happy for such people to keep talking, because for every hundred people that can't be bothered putting in the effort we ask, there's the one who genuinely desires this rare kind of environment and that's the one I want to find us.

[billy]

There's a rumour going around that The Pig Pen is a site that's really quite concerned with poetry... some even speak such things in derogatory tones, as if that's a bad thing... I'm happy for such people to keep talking, because for every hundred people that can't be bothered putting in the effort we ask, there's the one who genuinely desires this rare kind of environment and that's the one I want to find us.

seriously? god i do so hope so ( were it true, i think i may sob with happiness @--2

The moral of all this is: how much could any of us, hand on heart, say was ready for market --any market? If there is no market, perhaps we more and more satisfy ourselves, and by so doing , make what we write even less marketable?

i think i've said before; i may have two poems of publishable quality. after that everything is a delusion. it's easy enough to self publish but why. unless you want to give your words away as presents for coffee tables and such. sadly there is some great poetry in forums that never really sees the light of publishing day because people don't have the knowledge or let's face it, the cash.