The Peddler's Comedy

Photograph credit for this little still life
 with The Throne of Psyche
goes to Robin Rudd and her blog, Robin Has An Idea. 

Tomorrow:  Poetry marketing: helpful and/or amusing links

Lately I have come to realize exactly how hard it is to sell books of poetry in the U. S. of A. With my first book of poems, I was not able to go on the road for various personal reasons having to do with my husband’s professional training and three young children and so on. Little did I know what a great boon that was to my peace of mind!  But now I am getting a peddler’s lesson.  I did not realize exactly what a Pirlipat’s Krakatuk the poetry market was until I did a successful, crowded event where people broke repeatedly into jolly applause and I sold . . . precisely three copies. Three!  After another good event, the store sold . . . five.  

Now I realize that we live in a culture that is rabid about selling, and I’m not keen on either rabid commercialism or the measuring of the value of art by sales numbers.  I know that makes no sense, and that much dross earns gold and much that is gold receives small reward.  That’s the world, and I for one am not going to change the facts of the world or make myself dreary or anguished by contemplating those facts for too long. Nor do I intend to complain or whine—I don’t like the sound of either.  Poetry is far too connected with joy for me to bother with whinging. (What a great word whinging is; I hereby authorize the pilfering of said word from the U.K.)

Ideally, I confess that I would like to write poems and stories and be above such things. I’d like to sit up in a tower with Yeats (and without him, when I wanted to write) and never look down to see the peddlers who might or might not be hawking my books.

Nevertheless, 21^st century writers who do not go it alone have an obligation to help the publisher sell books—a writer who doesn’t sell may not have a publisher next go-round.  The need particularly applies to writers like me who do not have an academic affiliation (oh, to have somebodies to scratch my grateful back and I to vigorously scratch theirs in return, trala), who live in a dratted teeny-tiny village where they did not grow up (rather than a small town, a small city, a big city, a downright metropolis, or even some outrageous writer-haven like New York City), and who have a tendency to be caught up in the dream of writing rather than collaring people and demanding that they look at their wonderful new books (with delicious covers by Clive Hicks-Jenkins and 100+ creamy pages of poems, etc.)

So I am doing a little research in hopes that I can fathom what and how people manage to help support their books and publishers in this matter of poetry.  I want to know what works and what is not a waste of precious hours.  Because I have several more books of poems forthcoming, and I had better educate myself. And since other hapless-at-peddling-and-not-very-pushy people are no doubt whirling in circles in the very same leaky coracle, I’m going to post what ideas and links I have found in hopes that they will be useful to somebody else.  Some elements have been touched on in my House of Words series, but I’m sure there is material out there on the web, available to us all.