For many years, the notion of getting published was lofty and mysterious for me — deeply desired and too daunting for me to even quite set as a goal. Now I have two poetry books published, and more on the way. Granted, I’m publishing them independently as opposed to through a publishing house. But many things in the field have changed so as to make independent publishing feasible, and also more desirable in several ways to traditional publishing.

In traditional publishing, the first hurdle to overcome was that you had to sell your work to a publishing house, or to an agent who would then sell it to a publishing house. And agents and publishing houses want work that they think will sell. But their formulas for what makes things salable seem to be as follows: People who are already well in the public eye sell. Compelling concepts may sell. Concepts that fit stuff that is already selling well may sell.

Concepts. An interesting term. They don’t even want to look at your work, don’t want to step into the flavor of the first sentence, if you can’t summarize your whole book up mainly in one sentence and then polish off the experience in the rest of a short paragraph. (This is for the ditty that is called a “query”. Much is written about how to make a good one.) If your story is something that sneaks up on the reader, is not easily characterized but may captivate and move them, you don’t stand a chance, unless you can condense that same experience into one short paragraph.

But my experience with this was in the attempts to publish my novels. Poetry is a whole other story. Basically, the conventional wisdom is that poetry doesn’t sell. Most people who are considered successful poets, and have published several books, also have day jobs.

In traditional publishing, there seem to be two routes to getting a poetry book published. One is to become a professor associated with a university that has a press. The other is to submit many poems to various literary magazines and get them published, thus developing enough of a name that you might be considered for the publication of a book. Of course, those magazines have to agree to publish your poems, and from what I’ve seen in many of them, their criteria for what makes a publishable poem are different from mine.

So the fact that I can publish these poems myself is extremely liberating to me. In publishing my first book, I have had great help and support from my artist collaborator, Mellissae Lucia. In publishing my second one, I’ve had great support from many friends, who encouraged me to follow my muse and the call to develop myself as an artist. My third book, in production now, has support from still another source. I will talk more about this in my next post, as well as sharing my experience with independent publishing.