Publisher's Diary

A regular diary from Salmon Poetry's editor, Jessie Lendennie

10th October, 2000

7.30am - This time of year, rain, then bright sun.  Late autumn smell, but since we have no deciduous trees up here no leaves are fluttering to the ground.  I rather miss that. Sunlight, light wind. Everything is judged by the weather.  'Inner' (to quote Robert Frost) as well as 'outer' weather.  It's wonderful to work in such a beautiful place, but often we forget entirely where we are in the daily demands of tight schedules and tighter budget.

Hey, I realize that I can't be honest about poetry publishing without the negative stuff.

Well, I believe that Salmon is typical of many small presses and I think that much anxiety would be avoided if poets were well-informed about the practicalities.  So trading less angst for more fear? Hummmmmm....... Okay, how about plain old reality?  There is a general belief that an antagonistic relationship is the norm  between writer and publisher.  The 'Us' and 'Them' mentality.  I don't know about commercial publishing, when more money is involved and thus more seems to be at stake, but with an art form as marginalized as poetry, it's obvious that 'we're all in this together' . Poetry publishers have to expect a level of understanding and commitment from poets which is commensurate with what we put into publishing their books.  Poetry publishing in not profitable, but we all want it to exist nevertheless. Often we seem to have a conditioned response that money equals success. NOT so. I wish I had the money equivalent of all the wonderful endorsements and recognition which Salmon has had over the years - we'd be doing pretty good!  We're certainly successful - and we certainly don't have much money. 

There's a tired cliche that no one gets rich from writing or publishing poetry, but I don't think that many people know what this really means in relation to their own work.  Since direct sales are vitally important for our cash flow we recently had a book sale, offering a discount on all our books for this year and a free book from our backlist for each two others purchased.  I had an angry email from someone on our mailing list who has written to me several times asking if we can publish his book - in this letter he said that if we were publishing the right kind of poetry we wouldn't have to offer people deals to make them buy it.  The right kind was his own poetry and his friends' poetry.  He took me to task for being a tool of the Arts Council. Funny, all right. Except that it makes me realize how stuck we are in our own perceptions. I, of course, wish that I WAS more 'in' with the Arts Council, because we've always been under-funded for the amount of work we do.  So, I, as a poetry publisher, feel hard done by in the Arts Council's lack of meaningful support for our culturally worthy and marginalized endeavour, and, he and his friends, feel hard done by for being ignored by this snooty publisher who has resources which are not being shared in publication of, in his definition, worthy poets.  Where does this leave us? Back again to information sharing, I hope. There are a lot of poets and poetry lovers in the world and we now have the means to find them and make it easier for us all to buy poetry books and publish a wide variety of poetry.   One thing that I find many poets don't understand is just how much most poetry publishers have to struggle to keep going.

The bread and butter of small press publishing is direct sales. Decent cash flow is the ever-present challenge; made infinitely more challenging by the fact that bookshops can return books for credit at any time, so bookshop placements cannot be counted as sales until the book is actually sold to a reader. The bookshops and distributors who owe the most often decide to cut their debt by returning books.  With such a small budget, this causes us great upheaval, especially since the returned books may be damaged. We have no comeback - Hey, this is poetry, and, unfortunately, the attitude is often that we should be grateful to have the books in shops at all. 

Enter the Internet... da dum!... and a chance to reach people who are interested in poetry, but would never know of us without our website.  The web brings lots of other things, too, but for the most part its democracy thrills me since I see part of the mission of poetry as cutting across boundaries and speaking out, unaffected by market forces and literary politics.  A world community of poetry is emerging and it's very exciting. More support, too, which means more innovation and positive examination of accepted norms - One can feel closer to the realities and avoid 'Us' and 'Them' syndrome. 

Well... we'll see....

Daughter and Other Poems by JESSIE LENDENNIE The long- awaited re-release of Jessie Lendennie's prose poem "Daughter", first published over a decade ago, accompanied in this volume by a selection of Lendennie's previously uncollected poems.   MORE INFO>>>>