Marketing Fiction and Poetry 2

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

Continued from a previous post discussing differences between buying fiction and nonfiction, in which I noted that my experience as a bookbuyer suggests that some marketing techniques that work for nonfiction won’t work as well for fiction.

There’s one more thing I realized before I put this site up, back in May:

Poetry Is No Longer a Popular Consumer Art Form

“Huh?” some readers will say. “There are poetry sites all over the web. It’s probably the most popular art form there is, in the sense that it’s written mostly by ordinary people who’ll never be professionally published.”

Yup. That, precisely, is the problem.

Writing good poetry isn’t any easier than any other sort of imaginative writing, and most amateur writing is bad. Sometimes it’s very bad. Good amateur poetry exists, just as good amateur prose fiction exists; but it’s often hard to sort through the vast quantity of bad stuff to locate the good.

But something else — something worse — has happened with poetry.

Byron’s Commercial Success

In the early years of the 19th century, Lord Byron originally wanted to refuse all pay for his poetry; but he had debts to settle, and thus ended up accepting remuneration for his work —

Wait.

How does one make any money worth considering with poetry?

Two things:

1. He wrote good poetry. Sometimes he wrote great poetry.
2. Poetry was a popular consumer art form back then, as novels are now — that is to say, enough people were interested in reading professionally-written examples of the art that you could make significant money at it. Byron sold 10,000 copies of The Corsair on its first day of publication.

There are still good poets about. Some of them sometimes write really good poetry.

But #2 is no longer the case. There aren’t enough people interested in reading professionally-written examples of the art for poets to make significant money at it.

Why is that?

First, poetry and prose fiction both face competition from visual storytelling. The appetite for stories hasn’t diminished, but people can now watch stories, practically whenever they want, on television. And it generally costs less to do so than it would to buy enough books to fill the same hours.

In spite of that, prose fiction is still commercially viable. Poetry isn’t. So what’s different about poetry?

Tags: Byron, marketing fiction, marketing poetry
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