the self publishing diaries | the elusive audience
As I prepare to launch another book into the world this summer, I've been thinking a lot about audience. Mainly how to reach one, or maybe more, how to harness interest in a world where everyone's attention is less on things like art and writing and more on covid and post-covid anxieties. The joy, but also the surrealness of re-entry, both in a literal sense for those who've mostly been home for over a year, and more a change in orientation for those of us who haven't. (I, for example, had to commute and work since last summer, but have done little else in terms of going out or socializing with family or friends.) Also, how to rebuild the things that weakened the structure of our lives pre-pandemic. I was in an untenable situation that would have broken me if covid had not happened. I know this now and have been postulating ways to avoid doing it to myself again. (It should not take a deadly pandemic to save you from burnout. It should not have been almost a relief.)
And yet, books have been coming out, and people have been buying them all along. sex & violence did very well last summer and even feed, which had a much smaller release on my own this spring, sold enough copies to make me happy. Chapbooks, now as I've amped up new releases and gotten back on the horse are doing brisk business. Even I am reading a bit more here and there as my concentration comes back (still mostly poetry, not yet the long haul of novels.) Though I have noticed that while usually I'm keeping an eye on new and interesting releases, I've missed a lot of books coming out from folks I know and want to read and am now regathering from the past year.
I think about audience a lot when I think about self-publishing in general. I suppose in many ways I have the luck of having built an audience through a variety of means (some would call these "connections" (gross) though I like to think of it as "community." I know a lot of poets through having published them, published alongside them, or gotten to know them through social media. These make the task of self-publishing much more successful than I would have been two decades ago when I knew no one and nothing. And really, all you have to do is look at the insta poets and see that social media has made audience gathering and sustaining so much easier than it would have been before. Or the novelists (I follow quite a few in the YA genre) who do very well self-publishing on Amazon and are able to create buzz and interest in their work. It's a vastly different publishing world than it even was a decade ago and that's exciting. I've been re-thinking how to harness those energies for my own purposes. Also, how to discard the portions of po-biz that don't suit or interest me--is, the academic/poetry industrial complex, contest culture, traditional paths of "being a poet" that don't make sense, etc.
Of course, poetry is a little harder than fiction, esp, genre fiction. And hard if you do not write the sort of work that fits well in extracted instagram morsels. Many of these seem like inspirational sayings more than poems. And poetry is a hard sell anyway, even at a time when we seem to have these rising of interests--the Rupi Kaur factor, Amanda Gorman's inaugural poem fervor that made her an instant bestseller. How to find your audience when you don't have those qualities--to be quotable, to be inspiring and positive Most of my work is sort of dark and twisty and mostly of interest to other poets. I'm not sure how I would cater to more general audiences, or even if I could or want to. I often compare poetry and filmmaking. Everyone wants to success of a blockbuster, but most of us will, at most, get some kind of small indie festival attention, or mostly maybe nothing at all. Or maybe we're like horror in the 80's with little theatrical release, but that somehow made it on video into so many homes even still. The thing about being in the poetry community this long is you've seen a lot of come and go. This year's publishing all-stars and contest-winners sometimes disappear entirely within a couple years. Many of us never got quite that height or that kinda elusive high, but we are still here churning out work. Maybe my books will one day be like that ragged VHS copy rattling around in the bin at a fleamarket, and maybe that's enough.
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