The Paradox of Self-Promotion

Guest Post by Marc Alan Di Martino

I know these days people hate to read anything which isn't either uplifting or enraging. But here are some humbling statistics: last year my book Unburial (Kelsay, 2019) sold 0 copies. Zero. I'm not complaining. I did nothing at all to promote it, nor did I make any attempt to promote my second collection Still Life with City (Pski's Porch, 2022). My third, a micro-chap called Love Poem with Pomegranate (Ghost City Summer Series, 2023) garnered about $20 in donations, which isn't too bad considering it's available as a free download. Why am I telling you this? Because it's indicative of the writer's life, the writer in this case being an English-language poet living in a non-English-speaking corner of the world. Those of us fortunate enough to publish—and publish books—know well the thrill which accompanies each and every acceptance. It never gets old. And, nearly always, it is followed by the sound of a tiny violin when the publication reaches far fewer readers than one had hoped. We all want that viral poem like "Good Bones", by Maggie Smith, something that breaks through the wall separating the poetry community from the wider world. Poems like "Good Bones" are rare, though, and largely a consequence of social media.

Recently, a poem called "If I Had Three Lives" by Sarah Russell pierced that invisible barrier. I saw Sarah's poem appear over and over on Twitter before it became X (and I left), and it has gone on to find fresh readers on TikTok, a platform I have never, ever used. Sarah, to my knowledge, doesn't use these platforms, either. How it happens is a mystery, but let's just say every so often a poem is in tune with the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. In any case, her publisher—and mine—Kelsay Books, announced that Sarah's collection I Lost Summer Somewhere (2019) has sold well over a thousand copies thanks to her poem's longevity on social media and elsewhere. Kudos to Sarah! It's a wonderful poem, apart from any metrics. It was Sarah who encouraged me to send the manuscript for Unburial to Kelsay, leading directly to my first published collection. I have read her collection, and admire it. And that was before it sold all those copies.

My point, I think, is that success to a small-press poet looks like this: a thousand books sold. It's hardly "Love Me Do" or "The Da Vinci Code", which have each sold millions. We are content with small trophies. What we do takes time and labor—as much as any other art, in fact—but we seldom reap any rewards for our output beyond the satisfaction of having articulated the inarticulable. No galas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no Netflix specials, no Super Bowl half-time shows. We put our money on posterity, as Shakespeare wrote in "Sonnet 55":

Not marble nor the gilded monuments

Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme

So why do we do it? I think most of us ask ourselves that question each time we prepare a submission to a journal with a 0.5% acceptance rate, each time we piece together a manuscript and pay the $25 reading fee, hoping our particular brilliance will outshine that of our peers in an editor's estimation. Because all of this takes time—time from our day jobs, time from our families, time we might be spending outdoors, or reading, or doing a thousand other things than squinting at commas and scanning for spondees. I think we do it because we can't not do it, because in some way we need to do it. I know that every time I find a mot juste I have the distinct feeling that some arcane brick in the universe has just slid into place. Of course, it's just a feeling. A poem doesn't actually make the world a better place—not unless someone reads it.

Which brings us by a commodius vicus back to the beginning: why didn't I promote my own books? That's a good question, and one which merits an answer. When Unburial came out in 2019, back when all was still seemingly possible—travel, readings, human contact—I organized a couple of readings in Rome, not too far from where I live. I was fortunate enough to be able to involve other poets in these readings, including some rather well-known poets, through mutual acquaintances. One reading in January 2020 was a packed house, and became one of the most memorable evenings of my life. I was planning a trip to New York that summer to do another reading at the New York Public Library with a stellar bunch of poets on that side of the Atlantic. It felt like things were finally happening...

When the smoke cleared, Unburial was no longer new or exciting. I had a second collection to promote at that point but no good ways to promote it other than social media, which I've never been very good at. The landscape had changed dramatically in a short time. It struck me that book promotion is—or should be—the publisher's job, not the author's. (It's a radical idea, I know.) But small publishers are mostly as broke as the poets they publish, and often what they do is also a labor of love. In any case, my books—accumulations of nearly twenty years of creative activity—mostly sat there on publishers' web pages and Amazon collecting proverbial dust. And it's very hard to shake off that dust once it begins to accumulate. You move on.

There is only so much time in a person's life, and we are forced to make decisions as to how and what we spend it on. Given the choice between writing and revising new work and promoting my books on the Internet (those people grow tiresome quickly), I will always choose the former. There will never be an upside to shilling one's book on Instagram for a pittance in royalties, and every time I've made a half-hearted attempt at it I've felt the bite of shame. Even if I were to sell twenty copies in a calendar year, it would amount to around $40—hardly worth the time investment on my part, or the corrosive effect on one's pysche of spending all that time on social media.

As I mentioned, I live in Italy, outside the major cities with their English-language bookshops and American universities. To organize a small presentation in Rome or Milan might cost a few hundred dollars in travel expenses to generate a handful of in-person book sales, of which the venue would take 30-40%. So an $18 book I bought from my publisher at a 50% discount (plus international shipping) would be resold for a net profit of roughly $4. It's easy to see why—after the initial flurry of enthusiasm—one stops bothering with self-promotion. In my view, the best use of the little time I have is spent writing, not hustling. Like all writers, I am addicted to the feeling that comes from having unlocked a finely worded sentence, pinned an image to the page like a rare butterfly, kibbitzed with the ghosts and goblins of my past. I can't speak for others, but I do it in order to make sense of life and its bizarre complexities, to create something if not always beautiful, then at least meaningful.

If I wanted to sell things, I'd have gone into advertising.

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Marc Alan Di Martino is the author of the micro-chap Love Poem with Pomegranate (Ghost City Press, 2023) and the collections Still Life with City (Pski's Porch, 2022) and Unburial (Kelsay, 2019). His poems and translations appear in Gyroscope Review, Welter, Pulsebeat and many other journals and anthologies. His work has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. His translation Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell'Arco will be published by World Poetry Books in 2024. Currently a poetry reader for Baltimore Review, he lives in Italy with his family.