I recently posted a Ted Gioia substack repost of a Elle Griffin report on Major Publishing traits none of it good…’nobody buys books’ …
https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books
Before long nobody will even print them especially in poetry.
For the paper poetry magazine the writing been on the wall for a while see my response to Wendy Pratt on Substack here:
https://shaunbelcherwrites.substack.com/p/the-impossibility-of-producing-a-print-literary-magazine
Only subscriber based paper editions like The Poetry Review (UK) stand up due to being part of a subscription-model which was mentioned in Victoria Maul’s Poetry Review critique’ on Substack
https://vamoul.substack.com/p/what-is-a-poetry-magazine-for
As for actually producing poetry books read on…thanks to Jo Bell for sharing
https://www.galleybeggar.co.uk/what-does-a-book-cost
Add all of this together and it not a very good prognosis in fact as Galleybeggar Books state…
This is an industry – an immensely valuable one, brimming with passion and care – that is running on borrowed time.
In light of that and faced with a seeming mountain of online magazines being inundated by a million would be poets is there even any point in continuing down the old paper based path?
Now here we go. I read through the Galley Beggar stuff BEFORE looking at their list and I was struck how Londoncentric white middle-class it was. Not much diversity there more who you know London journalists who romantically dream of being the next Saul Bellow. fair enough but in that case would it really matter if they only published online or as digital ebooks. the answer is NO and here we come to the political point of all this. Far from beggers people of this comfortable a background are basically living a dream that probably never existed.
I am sure that some are Guardian picks (mates of mates etc) and I sure some write like angels BUT for fucks sake it a diversion from reality not reality in the present poilitcal climate and there isn’t a writer that deserves sympathy in front of the very real shit going down out there.
So oh dear Galley Press never mind there hundreds literally of presses and people like you but it does not fuckign matter in the rather prissy way you boost your list. Nobody on there is Saul Bellow and it nice you manage to knock a few books out every year but that’s it.
What is not touched on in the Galley Beggar description is a wider awareness of the fundamental shifts occurring in terms of phone driven distribution, reading etc. In a matter of a decade the very premise for the Galley beggar romantic Left bank writer dream will have evaporated. The technical disollution of the ‘literary’ scene is happening now and it will disappear before our very eyes.
I am old enough to have missed the literary dream first time around..that ship sailed without me when it did float. Now it sinking faster than Hugh Kenner’s original island. I met Lucy Ellmann’s father when he was still alive…he was a connection to a romantic life that now fading.
The future is bright, non nationalistic (even Parisian) based and always on always morphing. Today’s Samuel Beckett or Hemingway is on tik tok right now we just can’t see them yet.
The original nobody buys books article was mind boggling but one line from Galley Beggers Press sums it all up so that big name author reading down at Waterstones with the nice clothes and the air of superiority their fabulous avant-garde novel winning book of week in The Guardian or LRB……nobody fucking cares really apart from people like them that want to carry on the delusional times….meanwhile Waterstones..totally fucked..gone like Borders in a decade already sliding….it is over people you read it online first…Galley Beggers just wrote the epitaph of their own business.
the median sell-through for literary fiction (in the first year of publication) is 241 copies (Publishers Association stats).
Galley Beggar Press does not deal in anything but Fiction ( pace Salt new business model) as it the only sales left and it failing……Poetry..been fucked financially apart from a few better selling female poets for decades already.
Fake businesses stagger on maintaining the literary super-structure like a wasps nest with no wasps…paper thin..crumbling…
soon to be gone…
This is an industry – an immensely valuable one, brimming with passion and care – that is running on borrowed time.
The future looks like this
https://shaunbelcherwrites.substack.com/p/the-end-of-the-line-for-books
