Depressing statistics

• On their Dec 2021 blog cbeditions reported "As usual, getting the books into bookshops has been head-against-brick-wall. Roy Watkins’ Simple Annals was called ‘a masterpiece’ in the Literary Review and ‘an astonishing achievement’ in the TLS; on Leila Berg’s Flickerbook in the TLS, ‘Reading it is a joy; brutally honest depictions of childhood liberate the child within … This reissue is wholly welcome.’ Sales into bookshops: around 50 copies of each."
• In Becky Tuch's 2024 interview with Wayne Miller, Editor of Copper Nickel, it says that "They receive about 3,000 stories per year and publish about 12; receive about 15,000 poems and publish 50-60; receive about 700 essays and publish 4; receive about 100 translations and publish 6-8". Copper Nickel isn't an especially famous magazine (though it's 11th in a recent list of poetry magazines). The acceptance rate (1 in about 300 for poetry and stories) deters me from trying, and makes me wonder how they manage to find the best work.
• According to Nielsen, the top selling poetry book in the UK this year was "Wild Hope" by Donna Ashworth. She's an Instagram poet, selling a mere 33,472 copies. Homer was 14th, 15th, 18th and 20th. The Neilsen figures don't cover all sales. Depressing all the same.

"the North" (issue 67, January 2022)

"the North" keeps going - about 130 big, square, two-column pages. 136 poems by 78 poets (Philip Gross, Maura Dooley, Graham Mort, Pascale Petit, etc). There are selections from the pamphlet competition winners. There are about 17 reviews, and articles on particular books/poems. As usual there's a "Blind Criticism" article where 2 poets comment on a poem without knowing who the author is.

It's a good read.

• I liked "The Chain Ferry, memory" (Philip Gross)
• I liked "Dutch Masters in Sepia" (Maija Haavisto)
• I didn't get "From Seat E39", "On Balance", or the Jenny King poems
• I liked "Before the frost" by Anthony Wilson
• Helen Evans' "It's fun, if you're a child" is an 16 line specular poem
• I liked "Night Journey" by Jamie Coward, though I would have preferred it as prose.
• I liked "David Hockney's flip-flops" by Tessa Strickland
• River Walton has 6 pages of poems with illustrations. 6 pages too much.
• I liked most of "Rewind" by Anastasia Taylor-Lind
• I liked "Today you went to lunch with a cave" by Sarah Barnsley. Had it begun life as prose, I think it would be considered damaging to quantize it into little chunks.
• Despite the hypey puffs I didn't like any of Helen Seymour's 6 poems.

Several of the articles (and even a few of the reviews) are appreciations - of dead or favourite poets; of single poems or books. I should practice writing these, keeping all reservations at bay.

My Writing Year (2024)

This year I've written 7 poems (none of them very good), 4 stories (2 ok), and 15 Flashes (some of them ok. Maybe 2 good). I've radically revamped 4 old stories - by merging 2 of them I think I've produced 1 printable piece.

I've had a dozen or so acceptances, mostly of old (sometimes very old) stuff.

Because I was long-listed in their competition, I got a story in the Leicester Writes anthology. And Full House nominated a Flash of mine for Best MicroFiction 2025.

And that's about it. I sent 2 booklets off (one poetry, one prose) which got nowhere. This time last year I promised myself that I'd write some proper reviews. I haven't, though I've read (or listened to) about 200 books. The nearest I've got to writing reviews is writing in detail about some short story collections (my favourite type of book, I've realised). Long ago I wrote articles/craftnotes, sometimes many of them in a year. It's a while since I've done that. Maybe next year.

Currently I've 4 stories sent to competitions, 3 stories sent to magazines, 10 flashes with magazines and 10 poems with magazines.

Lessons from academic science publishing

What is the point of periodicals?

• To make work available
• To judge which work to publish (and edit it)
• To archive work
• To record who first had the idea

The Web had changed the speed/density of communications so much that ideas and feedback can be communicated in seconds rather than months. The Web has also encouraged the call for free access to publications.

The small-press literature world I'm interested in has tried to adapt to this changing world. Here are a few observations from the science/medical world, where careers and lives can be at stake.

• Minimal Publishable Unit - If you're being assessed by the quantity of papers you publish, it doesn't make much sense to put 3 good ideas into a paper when each of them could have been the foundation of a paper. So you use "salami slicing" to produce 3 papers.
  I've seen poetry sequences that seem to be thinly spreading ideas to the same end.
• Who pays? - In the old days, papers were printed in paper journals that libraries had to pay a lot of money for. The referees who read the submissions weren't (and usually still aren't?) paid - it was a good thing to mention on CVs. Nowadays journals are usually online-only. Submission is usually free but the publication fee might be thousands of dollars. This model of publication is open to abuse.
  Many literary magazines now charge for submission to fund their free-access publications.
• Pre-prints - Free-access sites exist where drafts can be sent to get comments, and to stake a claim on work. It means that important (perhaps life-saving) findings are quickly available to all. Some grants require that all the resulting papers are public access.
• Paper mills - Some periodicals have lax quality control. People pay to be published in them so that they have a publication they can quote. There are grey areas.

Helen Ivory at CB1

Helen Ivory read tonight, along with some open-mic poets who read 22 poems. Her pieces were all from her latest book about witches, hinting at how some of the issues associated with witches/women then (attitudes to menopause, beauty, etc) persist today.