Getting Your Poetry Published by the Poetry Book Society

It’s always been quite hard for poets to get their work taken on because poetry doesn’t on the whole have a huge market. For this reason poetry publishing in the UK has been publicly subsidised by the Arts Council for a number of years.

Most poetry lists are pretty small. They tend to be either poetry imprints in large publishing houses, such as the Jonathan Cape poetry list at Random House or the Picador list at Macmillan, long-established independents such as Faber, and a number of Arts Council funded publishers including larger houses such as Bloodaxe and Carcanet, smaller independent ones such as Flambard, Arc and Anvil, and pamphlet publishers such as Rack Press and Knives Forks and Spoons Press.

Publishers always have to be cautious about what they take on and there are good reasons for this. Poetry is not usually given much space in bookshops and in most of them it is difficult to find poetry sections that go much beyond some bestselling backlist and a few new volumes. Publishers have to work hard to launch new poets and they are therefore very selective about who they take on.

The good news though is that there is a lot you can do to kick-start your own career as a poet and to get your work out there in front of the public. This has changed radically over the years, with more and more readings, the proliferation of poetry magazines, self-publishing and the web all offering opportunities.

Thanks to David at the Poetry Book Society for giving us permission to use the introductory text from the Poetry Book Society website. You can read the full article here.

A Poet Turned Publisher: Guest Blog by Elaine Ewart

They’d arrived. I felt a thrill of excitement as the man at the printers’ slit open the box so I could see the books. And wow. Dafila Scott’s beautiful pastel drawing and Karen Harvey’s eye-catching cover design drew the eye. I pulled a copy out, opened it, had a sniff (doesn’t everyone?) of the freshly printed pages and pored over the text. I was too excited to take it in but the page numbers looked ok, they’d printed the right version, the text was aligned well on the page. It looked like a proper book. Short, yes. Only thirty pages: but thirty smart, professional pages, worthy of the poetic talents of our fifteen contributing poets. Words for Wide Skies: A Poetry Anthology. And I’d published it myself.

I’d deliberately chosen not to go down the route of print on demand companies on the internet. These websites will enable you to publish your book at a low financial risk, which can be helpful for a niche market. However, on closer inspection, the unit cost is typically high. Plus, you don’t have the benefit of physical copies to put in a shop, and you have limited control over the design. Hmm, not for me, I thought.

Instead, I’d gone to a local printers, who had given me a very reasonable quote, and said, ‘This is what I want; here is the text layout, and this is the cover,’ and they’d done it.  

It really was as simple as that.

That’s not to say it was not a lot of hard work. Since initially discussing the idea of a nature poetry anthology with the staff at the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust at Welney and my fellow editor Karen Harvey, a vast amount of work has been done: preparing a timetable, applying for funding, making a call for submissions and publicizing it, arranging the launch, selecting the poems, replying to everyone – and now the copies were here (phew!) sending out press releases, arranging reviews, logistics… All sorts of things.

But the point is, although it is hard work, it is not magic. If you’re willing to put that work in, are fanatically stubborn and eye-wateringly pedantic over proofs and will hover over your pet project like anxious mother hen because you love poetry and poets and, (good though blogs are) really, really, love a nice poetry book as a beautiful physical object, then you can make it happen.

And, importantly, it will happen with a very small initial investment which will enable copies to be sold at an attractive price. Five pounds was my target sale price – high enough for a decent profit for WWT Welney, to raise funds for their conservation work, but low enough for people visiting the reserve to say, well, why not?  Why not buy a nice book of poems?

Why not indeed.

© Elaine Ewart, 2013

Elaine Ewart is a poet and former Fenland Poet Laureate.  She blogs at flightfeather.wordpress.com  

Words for Wide Skies, a nature poetry anthology with a Fenland theme, edited and published by Elaine Ewart, is being launched at the WWT Welney reserve on Friday 21st June and will be available from WWT Welney from that date, price £5.  All profits go to the conservation work at WWT Welney.  For further details, contact WWT Welney by telephone 01353 860711 or by e-mail: info.welney@wwt.org.uk

Article on Music and Creative Writing by James Carter in Teach Primary Magazine

Teach Primary magazine is full of articles, ideas, lesson plans and news for primary schools. They also have 2 sister publications, Teach Secondary and Teach Nursery. Recently, James Carter's article on how to motivate pupils' creativity with music and it was published in Teach Primary magazine. Many thanks to Joe Carter, Editor, who has allowed us to share the feature with you.

For more information on Teach Primary visit www.teachprimary.com and for more info on James Carter visit www.bookapoet.co.uk/James Carter or email us at info@bookapoet.co.uk.

© Copyright 2012 Teach Primary. Do not use without publisher’s permission.

© Copyright 2012 Teach Primary. Do not use without publisher’s permission.