I went my own way

And I made it

It has been one week since I released my first self published poetry collection into the world. A project of bringing a collection of 5 years worth of poems together. Some that I have performed many times and people have occasionally asked where they can find them. Some are being shared in the collection for the first time. Either way, it feels very vulnerable letting them go and live in the readers mind, without my little side stories that I use on stage, or my captions online. They stand alone with whatever the reader brings to the reading.

My inner monologue has been a little in over drive thinking about what some people may think. Like what will the people who like my funny poems make of the serious ones and vice versa. What if people who know me in real life make previously un-held judgments about me, all because I TOLD THEM (even though not all poems are true). Have I shared too much? I know I held some poems back out of that fear right at the last moment.

It is a collection of 100 poems, that were selected from the 300 plus poems I have written in the last 5 years. The editing process has been a big process and a lot of darlings have been killed along the way. I also now realise, just because it EXISTS, it doesn't mean I have stopped learning about the process.

So what else have I learned in the last week?

In no particular order:

• You can’t predict who will see your promotion and buy the book - and it is lovely seeing people you wouldn’t expect buying it

• Launching before Christmas puts you in a tough selling position as people need to look after their £ but it is still nice to hear people congratulate me on the launch and support me via the algorithm (it does help and it is appreciated)

• I am ok with this as I am in this book for the long term, not the short burst of day one

• I did ask myself why I selected a Thursday when the launch date is an arbitrary choice and I found myself rushing home to make sure I could make my online zoom launch. I think I googled Thursday was a usual launch day, but honestly, I can’t remember. I do know that all self publishing platforms make you pick a date and gives you a deadline you can continue to make changes behind the scenes to the manuscript/cover.

• I have made 4x in royalties than my first book even though that book initially sold more copies of my first book in week one, primarily due to a pre-sale build up (see here for why I could not pre-sale this one). Amazon royalty rates are higher than publisher royalty rates so you can make more money with fewer sales.

  

• I have worried that people think the book is not high quality or serious because I am donating the money I make to charities (Choose Love and Refuge).

• As soon as I decided I was going to donate the royalties this made me feel less pressure in the ‘sales game’ and I have had more fun promoting it and seeing what happens as a result of this.

• I have also noticed some typos as soon as it has gone live. In the contents section there are two section 7’s and no section 6. Doesn't change the poems but frustrates me for not spotting in the 10s upon 10s of final reviews of the draft. There is also a ‘to’ instead of a ‘you’ in one poem which I realised as soon as I picked it out to perform recently. I have to live with these niggles and I probably shouldn’t point them out like this, but just so you know I am sharing the warts and not just the apparent glitz.

• The Amazon algorithm is a temporary thrill. For a few days I was sitting beside names like Brian Bilston, John Cooper Clarke and Carol Anne Duffy. I made it in to top 50 of all poetry sales for a day, and for a brief period I was a number one hot new release in Contemporary and British & Irish poetry. I know this was all a temporary moment and it was nice one.

  

• I have had to explain why I have chosen Amazon to a few people who are ethically opposed to it. I respect why they are and why that may lose me some sales. I also know I would not be able to pass on so much money to my chosen charities if I was with a smaller publisher. I also know that if I got printed at a local printer it would take a big upfront cost of printing from me. I would also have had to manage storage space, post and distribution & logistics, which would have made my role as a writer into something bigger than I have capacity to handle right now. I also know this limits my opportunity to get my book into shops, but I am also incredibly realistic about that. It would be nice, but I am just enjoying the book existing and finding the people it is finding.

• Getting reviews like this feels INCREDIBLE

  

  And help the algorithm and may help the book meet more people who may otherwise not find it.

• You can’t expect people to buy the book just because you have bought theirs - we all have different tastes and TBR (to be read) plies and that is fair enough.

• You can’t expect people to share social media posts about any of your work, including this, even if you have shared a lot of their work. Social media is not transactional and people have different ways of showing support and using their own posts for different purposes. (Can you see why I have a section called ‘Slave to the Algorithm’? I do notice, I am a human on the internet). I say this because I shared news of my book on my old instagram account ‘Community Poetry Officer’ - where I spent 2 years, voluntarily, sharing poetry events and opportunities - and I don’t believe I got a single interaction from those posts. Hard work for others, voluntary or not, doesn’t always reap a return, so always make sure you know why you are volunteering your time. I did enjoy the connections I made running that page in the moment, but just like any algorithm based connection, it is only momentary and no long lasting connections really were made in that venture.

  

• Having fun with promotion SHOULD BE FUN - and all these reels on instagram were fun to make, and were seen by people who would not usually see my posts. I think they led to some lovely opportunities such as recording of a few podcasts (news coming soon) and this article by GOD IS IN THE TV ZINE.

There are probably a few more lessons that will settle and reveal themselves in time but the main one is :

I AM SO PROUD OF MYSELF FOR MAKING IT HAPPEN.

Thanks so much for reading this milestone post filled with reflections. Do let me know if you have found anything useful or interesting in this post in the comments as I would be so interested to hear from anyone who reads this.

Proving I Exist: A Poetry Collection is available HERE.