Poetry is a beautiful form of self-expression that can lead readers to new insights, as well as entertain readers, make them laugh, and move them deeply. That said, poetry books are very hard to sell and many poets fail to write marketable poems or present their poetry collections in a marketable way. While a poet can feel very self-satisfied writing poetry, publishing a book of poetry makes little sense if no one is going to buy or read it. Here are some guidelines to make a poetry book more marketable.
have a theme
Many poets simply write a poem about what strikes them at the moment. Then they end up with about fifty or a hundred of those poems and decide it’s time to collect all the poems and put them into a collection. The problem is marketing such a book. When people ask, “What is your poetry book about?” most poets struggle to find answers. Typical responses might be, “It’s about life,” which is vague and boring, or more specifically, “It’s a collection of poems that explore love, death, nature, growing up, having a dog, gardening, old age, visiting France and sailing.” Boring, confusing, too many topics and too little of one thing. There may be a poem in that hodgepodge that interests the reader, but would you want to pay $15 for a book so you can read a poem about sailing? Doubtful. Gathering a bunch of unrelated poems into one volume will not help you sell your poetry collection.
Most poets would never think of writing an essay, short story, or book without a theme, so why publish a book of poetry without a specific theme? You might have fifty unrelated poems, but if you take a closer look, maybe five or six of them can be worked into a collection with a specific theme along with writing some new poems to give your book a focus. Your topic can be as general as poems about movies or the seasons, or as specific as poems about your battle with cancer or a poem about every president of the United States. A theme is a hook. It will answer the inevitable question: “What is your book about?” and it will give readers something to hold on to so they can make a conscious decision about whether to buy your book.
Have organization, even a plot
Often when I ask poets how they decided to arrange or organize the poems in their books, I get blank stars or they reply, “Well, I just put them in the order I thought they were, or the order they were written.” . , or there’s no specific order.” Even if you don’t have a theme for all the poems, you can at least organize them into specific sections based on what they’re about, like putting together the five poems about sailing, or the eight poems about love lost, or the three poems on raising children in their own sections.
If you are writing about your own life or experiences, why not make the poems chronological from childhood to old age? Perhaps you have an autobiographical novel in the form of a poem. Maybe you have a whole book that can be made from your poems. Or maybe you want to write a novel in verse. The Victorians often did: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Aurora Leigh” is a case in point. A single short poem may be quickly forgotten, but a series of poems building on one another is not likely to be forgotten.
Ask yourself, “When readers have finished reading my collection of poetry, what new understanding do I want them to have?” Make your first poem the introduction and your final poem a conclusion, one that sums up your collection with each poem in the process continuing the theme and moving toward the culminating final vision of the collection.
Have a trick or a hook. The terms “trick” and “hook” may sound a bit crude, but they illustrate my point. A collection of poems won’t appeal to most readers, but if you have something special to hook readers, you’re more likely to grab attention.
Numerous possible tactics can be taken to make your poems interesting so that they will appeal to people who might not otherwise normally read poetry.
Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River Anthology” had a hook. Each poem was told in the voice of a Spoon River dead man. While each poem stood alone, often the speaker of one poem was referring to people in another poem. For example, in one poem, a wife complains about how the minister convinced her to stay with her husband. Later, the minister talks about how his greatest triumph was convincing that couple to stay married. The irony, humor, and connections between the townspeople made the book so popular and memorable that it is still read nearly a century after its publication.
The illustrations or photographs are a hook in themselves. If you’re writing a collection of autobiographical poetry, why not insert photos of yourself and the people and places mentioned in the poems? If you are writing about Nature, insert photos of the places you mention. You could even go all out and turn the book into a coffee table book with large photographs alternating with your poetry. People might not buy a book of poetry, but they might buy a coffee table book for its stunning photography, only to be pleasantly surprised at how much they enjoy the poems too. Team up with a good illustrator or photographer and you could corner two different types of readers: lovers of poetry and lovers of visual arts.
Form or visual poems, more commonly called pictorial poetry or graphic poetry today, are another interesting trick. The challenge is to make the words of your poem take the form of an object that the poem is about. The design of the poem then becomes an image. The 17th-century poet George Herbert was one of the earliest designers of such poems, including his poem “Easter Wings”. Your poem can be in the shape of a butterfly, a castle, a vase, whatever you can imagine.
Get attention
Before you pull out that poetry book, do some research on the types of poetry books that are sold in stores. While there is still a small market for book sales for classic poets like Wordsworth and Tennyson, I think more people today are aware of Shel Silverstein’s poetry because it is fun, well-illustrated, and easy to read. I am not saying that there are no great poets today; I’m saying that most people haven’t heard of them. Let’s be honest; When most people hear the word “poet,” the poets that come to mind are people like Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, poets most people read in school who are long dead. weather.
Sure, there are great poets alive today, but few of those poets have made their books marketable. Unfortunately, most poets don’t understand or accept that the poet’s job is as much to find an audience for his words as it is to write those words.
Find your trick; make your book visually stunning; come up with a topic that will capture the interest and imagination of your readers; get a hook to attract readers who don’t usually buy poetry books. Once you build a following of readers, you can write your book of meditative poetry that is text only because you will have a fan base that will read whatever book you produce. Until then, do everything you can to get your poems noticed by readers. It is a worthwhile effort. The world may not know it, but it’s waiting for the next Maya Angelou, Allen Ginsberg, or Seamus Heaney to remind it that poetry has a magic that prose can’t provide.
