I was really pleased to have a quick chance to perform at the Spoken Word evening for the Alternative Press Festival in Hoxton on Friday night. A large volume of poets at the moment either self-publish or else publish through small presses, and whilst this is something a lot of other people in the industry are inclined to sneer at - I've worked at Penguin, so I should know - it's actually the perfect solution for any writer who doesn't want to jump through the hoops of the industry as well as anyone the mainstream houses don't want to touch.
"Come off it, Dave," I hear you sneer, "you're making a bit too much of a case for this, aren't you? If it's any good, it will come out through a 'proper' house. If it's not much cop, the writer self-publishes, and still gets ignored. Everybody knows that. Show me an exception, and I'll show you the exception that proves the rule."
Of course, I'm not disputing the fact that a lot of self-published material is awful, the last reserve of people who think they're misunderstood outsiders. You have to remember, however, that as poetry is a fringe art-form, huge sales are not usually expected, and it's extremely difficult to even get good poetry out there on to bookshelves. What a novelist of a certain ability can achieve through a publishing house, a poet of the same ability will frequently have to spend years begging for, then be content with his or her anthology not being given proper distribution or promotion anyway. This applied to a couple of very major poets back when I worked in publishing, who found their anthologies rotting in warehouses in the suburbs and eventually pulped, having never been given any promotion at all - it's by no means a problem uniquely faced by the junior school likes of me.
Self-publishing puts the decisions back into the poet's hands. With the right poet, who has the right drive and the right attitude, it can actually bring them more success. I won't shame them by naming them, but I know a number of poets who have self-published or gone through small presses who have outsold major writers by a shocking margin. They put in the hard yards doing live appearances and open mics, badger people to buy them, and find their books selling more rapidly than they might if they were only stocked by major city bookstores and independent outlets in the UK.
The Alternative Press Festival also managed something rather impressive. They contacted me back in May to ask if I could contribute something to a mixed media anthology they were going to put out to coincide with the event. I responded, they accepted one of the pieces ("The Collector's Riddle") and it hit the shelves in July, in the guise you see below:
The end product is full colour, features short graphic novels as well as poetry and other writing, is glossy to touch, and actually superior in design to a number of major publications which remained in limbo for a year or more. Self-publishing is as immediate as it was back in the late seventies when it really took off in a big way, but now the technology is much more freely available - glue and typewriter ribbons don't come into it.
"So why don't you shut up and publish an anthology yourself, then?" you ask, as indeed one other person asked me that evening, and the answer is - self-publicity isn't my strong point. I may do it one day, but I'd like to see if anyone else wants to take my work first. Somebody who can do a better job of selling it and designing it than I can. I'm not a hypocrite, just somebody who knows his personal limitations.
Ironically, no sooner had I come home from the festival on Friday night than I got a letter on my doorstep from a vanity press on Saturday morning.
"We'll send you a big bound book of absolutely everybody who has sent us a poem in the last month if you send us a cheque for twenty pounds, and we'll publish yours in there too!" seemed to be the gist of their letter. I really can't understand how people make money out of these sorts of scams anymore. I don't need an anthology of every piece of work, good or otherwise, a vanity house has received - surely that's like paying money to be a pretend editor? (Except whatever you think of what you read, nothing will come of your end decisions about what's good and what isn't - you'll just have wasted a lot of time by the time you get to page 600). Short of requiring an expensive piss-take of a doorstop in my house, or perhaps a paper-weight that features me, this is an absolute waste of time. You would think that self-publishing has completely eliminated the need for such stuff - it hasn't, it would seem, but I'm sure it won't take long.