I've never seen statistics on the proportion of poetry that's subsidy published or printed and handed out by the poet, but my guess would be somewhere north of 99%. I don't mean that just for this year or since print on demand lowered costs, I mean since the invention of writing. If cavemen had known how to write, we would have been treated to a lot of poetry about mammoths and horses rather than drawings. When the great library at Alexandria burned in ancient times, I'm sure the flames were that much hotter for all of the self published poetry scrolls. A few years ago, when my local library decided to cull their collection to make room for more movies (I don't go there anymore), they pretty much tossed the whole collection of unknown poets and unread memoir. Needless to say, if you're writing with the goal of getting published, I'd avoid poetry and memoir. However, if you're writing poetry because you have something to say, self publishing or subsidy publishing is the only realistic goal for 99.98% of us.
Because the vast majority of poetry books throughout time have been self published or subsidized, only an ignoramus would think there's any shame involved. There's a reason that self publishing poetry has been so popular over the centuries - nobody was willing to pay for it. The "real" money in publishing poetry has always been in publishing dead poets Even those who had success in their lives probably earned more for their heirs after they went on to explore the great mystery. These days I'm suspicious that more money is made selling dreams of public recognition to poets than selling books of poetry. The rip-offs range from sham competitions with dubious honors as the prize to overpriced subsidy publishing deals with even more overpriced marketing that doesn't stand a poet's chance in hell of selling any books. Much of the same is true for memoir, though if you're infamous, getting published is a real possibility.
All this negativity is just the setup for my business take on self publishing poetry or memoir. It's not a business, it's not even a lottery ticket, so don't think of it that way. If you want a beautiful book you can proudly give to your family and friends, on fine paper with an embossed cover, work with your local printer and under no circumstance plan on buying more than 100 copies. You'd be surprised how hard it is to give away a hundred books, I'm speaking from experience here. If you really just want to see your poetry or memoir in print and be able to tell your ex-friends and disgusted family to buy it through Amazon or order it through their local bookstore, shop for an inexpensive subsidy press. My only warning is not to give away any rights because you never know. Prices range from free (be careful) to a few hundred dollars to get a book in print and available through distribution, I couldn't justify paying more than $500 to a subsidy publisher under any circumstance. Just comparison shop until you drop and don't get caught up in worrying about royalties because it's not a business.
The other way of getting a poem published is to sneak it into another book. The first computer book I wrote for McGraw-Hill had a poem tucked away in one of the later chapters, though I'm sure critics would have called it a limerick or a ditty. Give me a break, it's not easy to write a poem about computer hardware. The high point of my career as a poet was receiving a letter from the project editor at McGraw-Hill telling me I had to credit the poet and get a signed permission. I don't think it would be possible to hide a memoir in another book without using invisible ink, but if I do think of a way, I'll get rich selling the idea:-)
Acquisitions Editor and Publisher
Self publishing as a business requires you to fill several job functions, some of which conflict with each other. The conflict that causes some self publishers to talk to themselves out loud is the one between the author and the acquisitions editor. The publisher job function can be thought of as the executive management position. It's the publisher who hires and fires acquisitions editors based on whether or not the manuscripts they acquire end up making money for the publishing company. Being the publisher can be fun and being the author can be fun but being the acquisitions editor is essentially a bean counting job. It's not about whether you like a given book (you better like it if you wrote it) or whether or not you judge the manuscript as being well written, it's strictly a judgment call about whether the title will earn the publisher money.
In the self publishing business, you are the acquisitions editor. I usually talk about marketing as being the primary job, but unless you are one of those evil geniuses who can sell salt to salt miners, you need to start with a title that is marketable. That might sound like the author's job, but the author's job is writing a good book. It's the acquisitions editor's job to tell the author not to bother if the book doesn't have a market. As a self publisher, you are in an excellent position with your multiple personalities to save the author some heartbreak by not letting the author spend months or years writing a book that you aren't willing to acquire. Unfortunately, most new authors start on the path to self publication by writing a complete book and only look into self publishing when they can't find a trade publisher. At that stage, there's just no chance that they are going to fill the acquisitions editor job function properly and turn themselves down if there's no market.
I've already written quite a bit about doing research to establish whether or not a market exists for a given title, which is initially the job of the author and ultimately the job of the acquisitions editor. You may have done a great job focusing your knowledge and skill into writing a book specifically for a proven market only to find that you don't have any marketing talent at all. That's not a minor stumbling block, it's the whole shooting match. It's the great tragedy of self publishing that you can do everything right and still fail when it comes to selling books, and not just because it's the hardest part. The problem is that selling books is the first point in the self publishing process that actually brings you into legitimate contact with the publishing world. It doesn't matter if you hired an editor and some proofreaders who all told you the book was great, that's not real contact. So, unless you've been successful with an Internet site or some other form of publishing before getting into the book game, you just don't know if the pieces are all going to add up. And that's what the job description of "publisher" is, determining whether all the pieces will add up.
I know some self publishers who really have done everything right, who are selling some books, and who have accumulated the experience see where things are heading. They often find that they can sell books through traditional promotional methods, like book readings and radio interviews, but the number of books sold per appearance just doesn't justify the ongoing effort for them. There are books that really require broad stocking in stores to gain traction, and books that benefit from having a trade publisher. I'm not shy about saying to these self publishers, "Look, the reason you didn't break into the trades earlier was that you didn't have the understanding of the publishing business you've acquired going through the self publishing process. Self publishing hasn't worked out the way you hoped and you say can't afford to put more time into it, so give being a trade author another shot." There's one way to impress an acquisitions editor at a big publisher, that's to follow their guidelines for submissions, write a great query letter, and keep trying.
Numbers for Book Sales and Nielsen Bookscan
I've written a lot about publishing industry numbers and how to estimate title sales using Amazon sales ranks. The one program I've never had direct access to is Nielsen Bookscan, due to the price. I have seen Nielsen reports thanks to low friends in high places, but I've never systematically used Nielsen Bookscan for research as practically everybody else with an interest in publishing numbers does. Nielsen aggregates results from the biggest North American book retailers, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Borders, but they lack data from the mass merchandisers like Walmart and supermarkets. Bookscan results are usually given as representing about two thirds of the industry (65% to 70%), but this obviously varies by title. For bestsellers that are widely stocked in mass merchandisers, you'd expect them to be way off, but for books that are sold almost exclusively through Amazon and the chains, which represent a huge part of the trade, they should be pretty spot on.
In an Op-Ed published in the New York Times last week, Tim O'Reilly pointed out that according to Nielsen Bookscan "only 2 percent of the 1.2 million unique titles sold in 2004 had sales of more than 5,000 copies." That amounts to 24,000 titles selling more than 5,000 copies a year. To put that into context, Amazon lists over 24,000 titles published by just one giant trade, McGraw-Hill, in the last five years. Obviously, some of those books are out of print and most of the rest aren't selling over 5,000 copies a year, but it should give you an idea about the relative smallness of the pie. According to Nielsen, they log sales of over 300,000 individual titles in a typical week, but by the time you get to the end of the year, only 1,200,000 unique titles have been sold. Those 900,000 additional titles that have to get smeared out over 52 weeks can't be averaging more than a few sales a year.
If you make a dollar or two a book as the author of a moderately successful title, selling a few thousand books isn't going to change your financial life. If you make five or ten dollars a book as a publisher, you might earn a living with a few average books, or get rich with a few hundred. Years ago, before print on demand publishing added its contribution to the explosion of new titles, I worked out from various sources that the average trade published book sold 2,000 copies. If anything, I suspect that number may have gone down. Bookscan data gives acquisitions editors a quick and painless (or brainless) way to estimate the market size for a particular title. As a self publisher, if you don't go through a similar exercise using whatever data you can, you're just kidding yourself about being in the publishing business.
Another fun number that I can't credit because I haven't a clue where I first saw it, is that Barnes & Noble and Borders turn over their inventory around twice a year. Just imagine, of the 100,000 plus titles in your local superstore, a large proportion won't even sell one copy before getting returned to the publisher, another big chunk will sell at such a slow rate across the chain that they get dropped within a few months, and of the remaining books, the average title will sit on the shelf for six months. Barnes & Noble and Borders have around 1300 superstores between them that represent the majority of the retail bookstore trade, so two copies per store a year only gets you to 2,600 books for a success! If we intentionally overestimate and say that the two chains only represent half of the bookstore market and that a given book is actually stocked everywhere else (which isn't possible due to bookstore size limitations), it would give us just over the magic 5,000 number.