Wednesday 8 May 2013

Big five poetry publishers in the UK: a gender audit



This post follows on from the last one.  Seeking an explanation for the gender imbalance in the Saturday Guardian Review’s poetry reviews, I’ve done a much bigger exercise, an online gender audit of the big five poetry publishers: Bloodaxe, Cape, Carcanet, Faber, Picador.  Plus a very quick count for Salt and Seren. 

It’s more complicated to do than you might think.... Instead of putting the results up front, I’m going to explain the methodology first.  In detail! 

The audit is based on information from the publishers’ websites,  occasionally supplemented by Amazon searches when data was missing or unclear. 

It covers books published between January 2010 and end April 2013.  (I chose Jan 2010 because it’s far enough back to give plenty of results, and happens to be the start date for the first Guardian audit, though of course publication and review dates don’t coincide.)  It counts books published, not poets.  So if one poet has had 2 books out in that period, he/she gets counted twice.

Reissues and reprints are included (alternative: spend endless hours identifying them!) but not Kindle-only editions or hard/paperback duplicates etc.  No title should be counted twice. 

I excluded poets who died before 2000 (may have missed a few), notably Faber’s backlist, apparently all-male since Jan 2010 apart from Sylvia Plath.  I included contemporary poets who have made versions of something old (whether Rimbaud or the Anglo-Saxons).  Contemporary translations are counted for the originating poet.  Straight translations of dead-before-2000 poets are omitted (yes, there’s a grey area).  Anthologies are not included. 

I would expect the results to be broadly accurate, say within a couple of percentage points either way.  Maybe they’re better than that, but I have almost certainly missed things out, and counted things I shouldn’t have (such as the occasional book from Carcanet or Bloodaxe that isn’t poetry, though I tried to weed these out).  Publishers’ websites may not always be accurate; the first Faber search I tried left out two recently published first collections. 

If any publishers would like to get in touch about their results, I’d be delighted to hear from them.  I’m particularly unsure about the results for Cape as I couldn’t find a full list of their poetry books on their website and have had to rely more on Amazon.  The Random House website has been down for hours, so I haven’t been able to check the figures again as I have for the others. 

Publisher
Total books published
Male authors
Female authors
Bloodaxe
101
41% (41 books)
59% (60 books)

Picador

22

64% (14 books)

36% (8 books*)
Carcanet
90
69% (62 books)

31% (28 books)
Faber
47
77% (36 books)
23% (11 books)

Cape NB: QUESTIONABLE DATA
18
89% (16 books)
11% (2 books)

Total

278
61% (169 books)
39% (109 books)

Bloodaxe are so far in front with their remarkably strong female representation that it seems unlikely any of the others would come close, even with revised figures.  I had no idea they’d come out this strong.  Is it deliberate editorial policy?  Are they snapping up a surplus of good women poets, who aren’t getting picked up by the other majors?  Because Bloodaxe publish a lot of books, they have a large and positive impact on the total figure for the big five.  All hail to Eric Bloodaxe! 

Picador are the only other publisher to score over one-third books by women.  Picador’s website has a page listing their current poets – 13 men and 8 women (62% and 38%), well over a third.  Not bad at all.

I’d expected Carcanet to do better – they don’t quite make one-third.  I recognised a much higher proportion of the Carcanet women’s names, which made me wonder whether their list includes some male poets who have been with them for many years.

I was shocked that the percentages of women are so low for Faber and Cape – under one-quarter.   Faber’s 11 books by women are by only 8 poets.  I don’t have the same name recognition issue as with Carcanet, either.  Cape’s figures look appalling, but I don’t trust the data.  Cape do have other women poets on their list who haven’t published in this period (and other men, of course): I found Jean Sprackland, Anne Carson and Vicki Feaver. 

I’m sure people with more knowledge of poetry publishing than me will have views on how to interpret the figures – please comment. 

As for the Guardian Review, whose reviews’ gender imbalance started all this off…  Even if one accepted (most unlikely) that it was OK to review poetry books mostly from the big five, the Review would still be in the doghouse for having a gender ratio (25% books by women in the last year) that reflects the bottom end of the publishers’ table.  Why??  

To cheer myself up, I had a quick look at Seren and Salt. 

Salt’s ratio over 131 books (poorly date-sorted by their website) came out at 64% to 36% male to female, same as Picador; not bad, but I’d expected better.  

Seren did cheer me up, though; 30 books, 53% by women, 47% by men.  Hooray!  This is how things are in most poetry magazines, etc: roughly 50/50, so that no-one need waste time and energy thinking about it.     

The Guardian Review didn’t run any reviews of Salt or Seren books last year. 

I didn’t try to audit UK black and Asian poets; I don’t think I could do this with enough accuracy to make the results credible.  From the work I’ve just done, I’d guess that Cape and Picador have published none in that period; Faber only Daljit Nagra; Carcanet a handful; and Bloodaxe quite a few.  Maybe the Arts Council does an audit of those poetry publishers it supports.

As some commenters on the last post pointed out, various other areas of the poetry world are worth auditing for publisher, gender and racial bias.  It can be difficult to disentangle these; having gender figures for the main publishers ought to help, as in the case of the Guardian Review above. 

But my inner geek has had enough of this for now. 

***

* I removed 3 Christmas publications by Carol Ann Duffy from Picador’s count; she’s still got 2 books in there.

50 comments:

  1. Thanks Fiona for gathering this information. I fully support the work done by Cate Marvin, Erin Belieu and others at VIDA. It's an important organisation. With regard to Salt, I would say that the imbalance is partly to do with the list's previous emphasis on non-mainstream poetry, where it seems there were fewer women practicioners. As editor, I have taken on around 16 poets for books or pamphlets in the last few years. The gender stats are not far off 50/50, though several of those books by women poets are forthcoming (three first collections and two pamphlets due in the next 9 months). What I found at first was that men were saying yes to book offers, women mostly no. Various reasons. More UK women are being published in book form than men - this has been the case for several years now (PBS list stats) but the bigger lists are not reflecting this, and this is partly down to the historical nature of those lists, editors sticking with (more male) poets who joined them in the 60s - 90s. It would be interesting to see the stats on first collections by the bigger publishers in the last decade. To take Faber as an obvious example, I reckon in the last decade or so they took on Laird, Molloy, Nagra, Jones, Berry, Oswald, Mackinnon, Riviere. Might have forgotten some, but half genderwise. Picador count is similar (five women, four men?). Cape has taken on so few new poets since 2000, it's not easy to make any judgement. With regards to poetry publication at this level, I'm more concerned with the age imbalance, as noted on your previous post by Kirsten. 90% of books published by the bigger publishers are by poets who are middle aged or older.

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    1. Thanks very much, Roddy – great to get a comment from someone on the inside! Your estimates for Picador and Faber are encouraging. If the historical factor is as important as you say, then things should even up, gradually… though with Faber’s list, for example, that will take decades to work through. For now, it’s very annoying to live in a world where the publishing bias is so marked.

      Of course the age imbalance matters. It would be much harder to audit. I don’t think that as an issue it matters as much as gender. Not being able to achieve something until you’re older is simply not as bad as not ever being able to achieve something because of who and what you are. And that means racial origin too – which I think is a bigger problem in poetry publishing than either sex or age.

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    2. Age is universal. We all start off young and we all get older and die (dying young is a well known good career move but self-defeating). Being young is always attractive. Being middle aged is just boring and if you're going to break into the market then you have to have fabulous USPs to attract attention. After that you get to be a phenomenon when you're ninety.

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  2. Gender is not the only imbalance. the big presses feed up from the small presses, where there is if anything more women's work than men's around at present. the age imbalance in the larger presses is because of this -- they pick up people who have made their bones in the smaller presses. Sometimes they pick them up young but more often not. and they keep them on contract, so their poets get older and older.
    The other and more worrying imbalance with the larger presses is social background, together with political attitudes.

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    1. Yes, there’s an element of career progression to that.

      As for social and political aspects, I wondered about these when compiling the lists. And experimental / avant-garde writing versus the mainstream, of course. If there are any sociologists out there looking for ideas, they could do worse than look at the poetry world as a microcosm of contemporary society.

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  3. To throw in another general feeling, I get the impression that women are more likely to get snapped up by smaller presses & stay with them than play the longer game of aiming for a big press (how many get directly snapped up by big presses, or are published after several collections in smaller presses? Would be intrigued to know about these paths as might explain some of this)...

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    1. Interesting – raises the question of ambition, or otherwise. PhD student needed to study this!

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  4. Oh and thanks for publishing these two fascinating audits, it must have taken you hours to do!

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    1. It did…. and a gender audit – a superficial one, not taking into account important factors such as the ones Roddy raises – is the easy audit to do. The other questions it leads to are much harder to measure.

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  5. "The Guardian Review didn’t run any reviews of Salt or Seren books last year. "

    Indeed they didn't, nor much at all from small presses. I'm quite bored with Guardian and Observer poetry reviews, which are not only all about the Big Five but, quite often, one-sidedly sycophantic - not always the reviewer's fault, sometimes the critical bits get cut out by sub-editors.

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    1. Yes. I found eight Guardian reviews in the last year of books from small (and smallish) publishers. And I agree on the tone.

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    2. To me the question of tone is even more important than the question of gender/age/whatever balance. Bad reviews are worse than no reviews at all, and far too many of the reviews in the 'big' newspapers are bad because they appear afraid of hurting the big names, both poets and publishers.

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    3. Yes. There’s a lot more to say about the state of criticism today… wish there were more people writing big (and preferably controversial) pieces about where poetry is and where it’s going. The sort of thing one reads on the Poetry Foundation website sometimes. As it is, the controversies appear to exist mostly in private, or in transient Facebook conversations.

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    4. It needs the right venue; Claire's Sabotage is part of the answer, I think.

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  6. Carcanet has always had a lot of gay men poets while at least when I was noticing this in the 90s Bloodaxe had none that I could identify (but they were publishing Jackie Kay - I can't remember if there were other out lesbians). It's hard to know how much an open sexuality will affect editorial decision, but it does make it tricky to work out how to pitch a collection when it's very much part of what you do and will probably attract attention, but then is likely get you into a ghetto and limit readership that way. I don't like airing hard luck stories but on the age issue I can tell you that when Moniza Alvi and I had a Smith/Doorstop winners double pamphlet (1992), she had already been accepted by Oxford but was told by Jackie Sims that being "head of English" rather than "an English teacher" in the bio made her sound too old. JS seemed to be seriously considering my collection until we met at Moniza's launch, and her immediate response when we were introduced was "Oh, I thought you were younger". Moniza and I are the same age; 38 at that time, but I have had grey hair since I was 20.

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    1. Interesting. For what it’s worth, I don’t think of gay poetry as such… seems to me there have been, and are, a lot of very good poets who happen to be gay; I think of them first as good, in whatever ways they are, some of which may be applied to material/experiences etc that may implicitly or explicitly be ‘gay’. I am sure there are far more sophisticated ways of expressing that!

      Your ageism story is grim – and you were both so young…! I think being a middle-aged new poet is potentially problematic – it’s less interesting/glamorous, and one has less productive life ahead. The age discrimination thing works both ways.

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    2. I've suspected this bias against older poets for some time, but didn't realise it went back quite so far. When I was a young poet, I was keen to learn and didn't want to publish too early. Peter's story is horrifying. This age bias is one worth investigating!As a woman and aged 58, no wonder I keep meeting barriers. Though I've had ten poetry publications out with good small presses, and sometimes I think I am better off there than being with the bigger presses - if they drop you, you're stuffed.
      I agree with you about gay poetry - the poet's sexual preferences don't interest me - the poems do.

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  7. hi,

    My first question is: Do we publish poems, or do we publish people with poems?

    The answer is: people... we publish 'identities'

    We fill quotas; we over-fill quotas - fine...

    Making this 50/50 addresses gender bias... Fine. Ok

    I have no qualms with this. I don't find it cynical. It's the game

    (But) there is a saying in snooker: you play the balls, not the opponent...

    Meaning: quality is what matters... determinism

    If the aim of publishing is to give the reader the best poems (I assume)
    then, would it be better not to link reader with poet via registration number, arbitrary third party detail..?

    Anonymous is the real answer...no?

    I don't feel any need to know your name or gender or where you are from to enjoy your work. Maybe, that is just me..

    Just my thoughts..




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    1. Hi. Anon poetry does happen of course, in competitions. And a very few magazines – doesn’t Iota do this, and there’s one called Anon.

      But in many parts of the poetry scene – including most of the better magazines – gender just doesn’t seem to be an issue, and no-one needs to play a numbers game. Which is even better!

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  8. Really interesting post - but the Guardian Review did actually review 6 poetry pamphlets last year, with the lovely Emily Hasler's Salt pamphlet getting props - http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/16/six-poetry-pamphlets-review

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    1. Quote from my previous post: “And there was one review.. of half a dozen pamphlets, also not included. Oh, for more such!”

      There was no long review in the Guardian of any book by Salt – unless I missed one.

      If only…

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    2. I had a Salt Modern Voices pamphlet which was not reviewed in such lofty places. So it's rather random what is chosen to be noticed. The SMV pamphlets were all worthy of note. They need a broader sweep, because at the moment the nationals are cutting their poetry review spaces and therefore not serving their readers. And quite frankly the standard of reviewing in The Guardian is not what one would hope.

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  9. I am particularly interested in these figures and wonder what percentage of new and up and coming poets make it into the publishing world, I have been trying for some time now and feel it's a pretty closed industry. Either my work isn't good enough or opportunities for new talent are few and far between, I fear the latter, though I remain optimistic.

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    1. I don’t think that it can be a closed industry – it needs new blood which has to come from somewhere. The question is rather whether factors such as who you are, where you come from or who you know affect your chances. [I don’t mean you in particular of course, but a general ‘you’.] That said, it looks formidably difficult to break into when one is setting out, and there do seem to be more poets than there’s room for (and not enough readers!)

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  10. It is intriguing to think how this situation might progress when the print versions of broadsheets go, as they seem doomed to (a friend of mine who works for one of the major broadsheets spent half of today in a 'crisis meeting' where the subject was basically, 'can we continue with a print version daily?'). Times, Indy and Guardian all appear to be on the edge of closing their print versions. How literary journalism will continue when newspapers become mainly digital presences will be interesting.

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    1. Depressing news that they’re that close to it… bad for the eyes and the brain, and maybe for literary journalism, but who knows? Easier to predict it’ll be bad for people’s breadth of reading – one advantage of broadsheets is that you’re exposed to more stuff, because it’s all there on the page.

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  11. Commercial magazines too, are in crisis -- Newsweek printed its last paper edition last December, others give themselves 1 - 5 years before becoming paperless. So will small independent presses remain the last paper publishers?

    My guess is that literary discussion in named media outlets will become more blog-like... rambling, discursive, linked to personality profile of reporter. But will they retain gatekeeper power? And if the critical content of reviews in some broadsheets is being cut by subs so that only the opinionated statements are left (as suggested in previous comments), then the greater word length possible on-line could result in better, more complete reviews. Then again, it could turn into a mass of tiny review capsules... we'll have to wait and see.

    Like Fiona, I'll miss the experience of pages, and wonder how the serendipitous glance will survive within the structure of hyperlinks. And the tyranny of "most popular today". I suspect it will become even easier to miss the poems embedded in more general publications.

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    1. Thank you Nancy (love the zigzag name) for these speculations. I didn’t even know Newsweek was no longer on paper! At least we live in interesting times…

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  12. The idea that things are more utopian in smaller presses doesn't seem to hold up. CB press, which is excellent, appears to only have 4 female writers ut of 24 (at a rough count) which is nowehere near parity: http://www.cbeditions.com/books.html

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    1. CB editions: guilty as charged. I’m well aware of this imbalance. (It’s particularly bad this year: out of 9 titles, around double the usual annual number, only one is by - and translated by - a woman.) As for what, if anything, I should be doing about it, I don’t know. Positive discrimination? The thought of having a year in which I published only women writers has crossed my mind, but no.

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  13. Hi Fiona,

    Great bit of analysis - having data really increases transparency. I was amazed not only at the gender issue, but the smallness of the poetry 'industry' as a whole. Certainly its interesting to see that one man (Neil Astley) makes the decision on 36% of the "big" five output. Data on the gender of the decision makers elsewhere might also be interesting.

    I believe that Bloodaxe have or had a moratorium on new authors and return up to 5,000 manuscripts unread every year. Certainly their submissions page says "If we aren't able to publish your poetry this may have nothing to do with the quality of your work" which, if you think about it, is a challenging idea! Surely it is time for some fresh thinking about the relation between being printed and being published, the internet, and particular mobile phones would seem to provide a more interesting way of writing and sharing poetry than the current stifling of both quality and quantity in the print 'industry'. Certainly it would remove the barrier to institutionalised gender imbalance.

    Best regards.

    BTW - Do you know what the print run is for these books? Has poetry fetishized being printed?

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    1. Thanks Anon. Rethinking is happening to some extent, isn’t it, with online poem-a-day blogs, online magazines, ebooks, poetry apps… For me none of this is the same as having a book in the hand – especially for poetry, where I want to move freely around. A generation brought up on ebooks may reinvent this world.

      Sales figures I’ve heard quoted are (on average) 350/400 for Salt, 500 for Bloodaxe (higher for their popular poets), and 2-3,000 for a publisher such as Picador which has a marketing team and only publishes a few books each year.

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    2. Anonymous has misread the Bloodaxe submissions guide. There is and has been no moratorium. We do receive thousands of submissions, but none are returned unread. But we have a stable of poets producing new books every year, so the openings for first collections are few. Three in 2013, one man, two women. And there is no positive discrimination over gender or ethnicity. If we've ended up with a list which is roughly half women, half men ( with more books by women over the pasties years), and with a significant number of black and Asian poets, that is is simply a reflection of the quality of the work as far as I am concerned. We also publish a significant number of gay poets, some of these necessarily focusing on gay subject matter in their work. So what we publish reflects the range of poetic talent in the population, which seems to me the natural outcome of an open editorial policy, just going for what I see as the best work from all kinds of poets. Maybe not focusing on one narrow area of poetry also helps keep the list open.
      Neil Astley, Editor, Bloodaxe Books

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    3. Sorry, two texting errors crept in here.
      Past not pasties in the parenthesis (predictive text error).
      And in the sentence about gay poets, insert the missing "not": some of these not necessarily focussing on gay subject matter in their work" .

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    4. Dear me, just spotted something else, only having just come upon this blog ( while supposed to be on holiday) . I question the assumption about "2-3000 (sales) for a publisher such as Picador which has a marketing team and only publishes a few (poetry) books a year.

      Bloodaxe and Carcanet share a great marketing team at Faber Factory Plus (with Faber Factory doing our ebooks). Our sales of poets with comparable reputations to Picador's are equal to or higher than theirs. Our marketing and press publicity for a poet or book doesn't stop a few months after publication as tends to happen with the big trade houses. We keep promoting our authors right through the year and into the following year or years, which is why you'll see many more of our authors doing readings at festivals and the other regular reading venues. I really take exception to this myth that poets do better with on small lists with trade publishers (apart from Faber obviously whose marketing of its own list is unmatched). OK, you may work with an editor who has a small list of poets to deal with, but the notion that this attention continues with full-on marketing back-up from the rest of the publishing house after publication is nonsense. In practice, the publicity and marketing people at the big trade houses quickly move on, once the poet's book is published, to devoting almost all their efforts to the publisher's commercial books. The management wouldn't allow anything but that to happen (again, apart from at Faber, which everyone seems to forget is an independent publishing house, albeit a rather large one). Whereas the specialist poetry publisher mostly only publish poetry or poetry-related titles, so we keep promoting the poets and the poetry.

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    5. What is the best way, for a new poet as I am, to be considered for publication?

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    6. Thanks Neil for this correction on sales figures - it's good to hear that.

      On the theme of big five publicity, have you read CBe's recent piece? http://sonofabook.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/talking-to-big-people.html. This suggests that publishers' publicity departments can be somewhat incompetent! And arrogant. And short-sighted, too - those of us who will be wandering around CB's book fair are book buyers. We take our book bags and fill them up. We'd like to see Bloodaxe, Faber etc there too, taking part. Picador's presence last year affected my perception of them.

      Am looking forward to hearing CD Wright at Ledbury.

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  14. Thanks for all the comments. This blog is now going on holiday, with D A Powell, Jason Schneidermann and Kathryn Maris for poetic company.

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  17. Just a comment on the issue of 'Oh it's okay because lots of good women are coming through publishing pamphlets.' I think this is very similar to the idea that in big organisation there can't be a problem because there are lots of women in junior positions and they are bound to progress to senior level soon. Except fast forward a few years and it's still a (white)men's/boys' club.

    I got to a point where I just felt I was hitting some kind of glass ceiling in terms of poetry publication. I wonder whether more women than men give up on poetry. I also wonder what will happen to the fresh-faced creative writing graduates (of both genders.)

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  18. I am hitting a glass ceiling too. Except I am male, in my thirties and editor at a well respected magazine.
    Boo hoo.

    Ps. The vast majority of the poets I like right now are female.

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  19. Good point of Sheenah's about the Guardian who used to review small presses (including us!) but who in recent months seem to have slid back to the BIg Name poetry publishers.

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  20. Interesting comments and thanks Fiona for this informative and insightful article. It's tough being a new poet, a woman poet and an Asian woman poet. I face all these. I'd love to get a poetry collection published but publishers either don't read, even though they claim they do, or they don't accept unsolicited manuscripts. I got so fed up I started submitting to literary magazines and journals. The truth is that most poetry book publishers prefer a well known name or someone introduced by a well known name. For others like me its not easy to break in.

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  21. Please do check out my introduction to Women's Work: Modern Women Poets Writing in English (Seren) co-edited with Amy Wack who is poetry editor at Seren. This includes figures showing Bloodaxe stands outs as publisher in respect of their publishing regardless of gender.

    It includes remarks on what I noted was the "glass ceiling" of 1/3 women in most so-called mainstream anthologies. Other starting points for essay - or the reason for making it as long as it is - were the figures for women editors of anthologies and another Guardian poetry series again bereft of the women poets one would expect to be there. And then there was the Guardian article by a young women commissioned at that time in a rather predictable way as the response to exactly this criticism.

    This blog post is one of a number that's appeared since the publication of Women's Work which adds to and amplifies statistics I was sure to gather and include for my essay, lest anyone disparage the value of my own and other poets' experience. Regardless of the essay permit me to recommend the book for its poetry, which is the main point after all and for which it was acclaimed, in Independent for example. One main aim of it was to fill in the gaps and, in particular, bridge the USA/UK/Ireland divide....as I do myself. I'm still amazed that my well-read Goldsmiths students often haven't heard of many of these poets....as indeed I'm sure many American students don't but should know of those poets' counterparts here.

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    1. Eva - I too publish "regardless of gender". In the sense that if every manuscript that arrived had come in anonymously, I truly believe that these are the ones I'd have chosen. Yet the stats (somewhere above in this thread) show that I'm severely imbalanced towards male writers. I publish so few writers that I'm hardly a test case, but for all the value of Fiona's and your own research in pointing up the issue (which everyone in this thread seems to agree on), What Do We Do About It? - a question no one here seems to have moved on to.

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    3. Recognition of the problem may go part of the distance towards a solution. Recognition has to filter through more widely in the literary world. The issue continues to provoke vitriol and person attacks which invalidation is part of the problem. Many men don't even consider the subject worthy of consideration (she said, generalizing, though not without reason) which is a great obstacle to any solution or improvement.

      The original idea of women's work was NOT a gendered book but one intended to bridge as per my comment above. Couldn't sell it nor any other anthology except something to do with women….and I don’t believe my ideas are crap. And then you should have heard some editors' responses to idea of reviewing a women's anthology, heaven forbid. Anyway, in this way women writers are shooed back into their pigeon-holes, their accomplishments - diminished as "special interest" - confirming gender as their only subject. My essay also touches on this.
      That the issue is how women are perceived and treated generally may make it seem too hopelessly enormous and wide-ranging, but I like to hope if I can possibly manage it. So it's a ship. It takes a long time to turn.

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    4. Charles, you are of course right... getting the information is just the first stage. There's more of that to get, too - whether for gender or all the other questions raised.

      I think there are some invisible gatekeepers. For example, I don't know who at the Guardian (or any other paper) decides which books it should review. I don't know how shortlists and winners for the major prizes are chosen - how much it's a matter for the judges, and what other considerations apply.

      It would be good to get more of this stuff into the open. And then to apply pressure. How? A letter to the Guardian Review would be a nice start on that particular issue, with several signatories. Knowing who takes the decisions means they can be questioned about it, in public and private.

      That's just a start - I've been on holiday, just got back. Any ideas?


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  22. Shirani, but submitting to magazines and journals IS the first step to getting published! So you did the right thing. As an aspiring poet you should be reading, and aspiring to appear in, magazines as well as books. It isn't easy to break in; it's well known as being difficult. Publishers aren't just buying your poems, as if they were apples or tins of shoe-polish; they're signing a contract to work with you, the author, and as with any other thing where you might approach someone to take you on in some capacity, it's as well to have some kind of CV to show them. They want to know you're serious, in it for the long haul. Publishing is a long game. As much as anything else, tenacity counts.

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