Last night, after a week's delay due to our colds, made it out to see American Fiction, which looked to be comedy-heavy in the trailer, but actually turned out to be both a great satire of the literary and film world, as well as the bonus of a really good family drama. Some of the struggles in the movie were related directly to the black experience it is centered around and the ridiculous expectations for black African-American writers, but other parts were painfully familiar I imagine for all writers of all races and cultures.
Writers on film are always laughably unrealistic and sometimes at the same time, sobbingly familiar. A couple months back, we watched Adaptation, and though the genres are different, both of these felt similar in their critique of the publishing world (especially where it links up with the film world and its own ridiculousness.) Poets rarely make the screen, and when they do, it's morose biopics of the most tragic and/or glaringly idealistic (ie, the husband in Mother!)
At the same time, after I watch these sorts of movies--the discussions centered around audience desires and trends and how to conduct yourself as an author in the world, my occasional feelings of invisibility actually feel like a relief. Yes, no one is paying any attention at all to the poets in the grand scheme of things, and yet, *gleefully whispers* nobody is paying attention. It's the ultimate place of freedom when the steaks are so alarmingly low. If my next book is drastically different from the last "successful" one, it's probably the difference of maybe a few hundred bucks in direct book sales, not a steep advance that will never pay out and critical annihilation that can taint you going forward. For every reader you may lose, you may gain more. I remember when the fever almanac, my first book came out, a couple reviews mentioned that they did not like in the bird museum as much. But other people ignored the first book and loved that one. Or loved the next. (though the joke is on book #1 because guess which one is still actually in print?) What is probably my bestselling book (and by that I mean maybe 300 plus copies) was girl show, which more closely resembled my first book, but which recently fell out of print with the publisher after a strong decade. The rest trail behind, though it was shared properties of water and stars, published in 2013, that perhaps got the most critical attention, but not the most sales. At some point, I stopped looking for logic and took whatever came as it may.
With self-published titles, I can see a little the dynamics of driving book sales. The more work I put in, the more it usually yields in terms of copies sold (I haven't yet took any of these books on the road to readings since the pandemic hit and everything has been zoom since.) The results and failure are a little bit more immediately visible rather than waiting for publisher statements and royalty checks (tiny ones at that.) Becuase no one is hoping to make money on poetry in general, least of all me, it's almost a relief. There will be more books. They will sell or they won't sell. I will keep on writing.
