An AWP Virgin Speaks Up–Part II

One of the smartest and most honest things that I heard from any panelist at the AWP Annual Conference last week was from Julie Barer, a literary agent, who said that the best thing anybody could do to get himself or herself published was to go out and buy a book of poems or short stories. 

The very real question she asked was this: “When was the last time you bought a book of poetry or short stories? Everybody’s writing them, but who is buying them?” People looked around the room as if searching for a savior, someone who’d cry out “I’ve purchased a new collection and/or anthology every other day for the past three years and BOY am I HAPPY!” We would have circled that person, bowed, and made wreaths of laurel.

Nobody said anything.

Trying to justify my own existence, I thought, “C’mon! I came home with a couple of short story collections just the other day! And I bought them at full price from my local independent bookseller!” I realized very quickly however, and with cringing humility, that the books I’d bought were Wilderness Tips and The View From Castle Rock, written by Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro respectively, neither of whom are exactly what you’d call “emerging writers.”

That’s when my shame at not having bought a new book by a writer I hadn’t known for 20 years hit me. I realized Barer was dead right to put at least part of the responsibility for the decline in sales of literary titles on those of us who write.

What else do I wish my colleagues — especially the hundreds of very young colleagues — at AWP were able to discuss with more honesty? How about the fact that it would be easier to land a starring role in Cirque du Soleil — one of the ones where you leap to the ceiling from a standing position on your tiptoes, do a triple somersault, and land gracefully balanced on one elbow — than  to get an unsolicited short story or poem into The New Yorker? How about accepting the fact that the odds show we’d have a better chance of making it to the finale of Dancing With the Stars than of getting even the most tender, early, lovingly penned poetry published in The Paris Review? And everyone, at a very early age, should be informed with as much kindness as possible, that while hand-making your own paper from assorted wildflowers culled from national wildlife and writing your own poetry on it in beautiful calligraphy, sewing the binding with colored silk thread, and selling copies to your family, friends, and members of your writing group is adorable, it probably will not help your chances of getting a deal with a press.

If it were easy, everybody would do it.

Actually, since everybody seems to be doing it, what we need to discuss is what even “counts” as doing it successfully and with significance.

Someone in the audience asked if “there are books that are considered unsuccessful?” Boy, did I want to answer that one. I’ve written several of them, you see. If a trade book doesn’t sell at least 7,500 copies, your trade publisher isn’t going think you’re a success. Publishing is a business that depends on profit. Even not-for-profit publishing companies have to sell books.

It isn’t about being loved. We grow up thinking that the world is going to be one big refrigerator, and our articles, poems, drawings and general musings are going to be placed by fame’s magnet in a prominent position. It’s simply not the case.

So when my wonderful undergraduate and aspiring-writer student Julie asks me the blood-and-guts question about whether I’d rather someone buy my books and never read them or borrow them and read them cover to cover — and although it makes my heart shrivel and screech and I really do know that this isn’t the “correct” answer — I must admit I would choose the former.

I hate myself for it, but there you go. If I want to keep having my books published, I will need to keep making sure my books get sold, and then simply hope that, having made the investment, people will — someday, maybe, just maybe — read them.