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The poetry market in this country has always been shallow, and the industry itself grounded in narcissism. I suppose no one is to blame for this. Money guides us, speaks louder than poems. The result of this lack of armchair support, and related financial interest, however, has led to stagnancy. The focus has remained on poets who in the past have shown the most success - the voices of black protest who helped usher in the new, rainbow-coloured consciousness. Unfortunately, this has left little room for emerging artists, a generation of poets more concerned with the global situation than with the restrictions placed on their thought by present geographical realities.
This is not to say that I disagree with the poetry of black consciousness, or with the role it still has to play in our society and the rest of the world. Many of the poets I respect and appreciate are black performers and artists who speak out against the continued tyranny, injustice and corruption of the ruling elite. I suppose had I not grown up as a child sheltered in white suburbia I would have lent myself to the struggle against oppression, the same as the likes of Jeremy Cronin and Dennis Brutus. No self-respecting poet whose very artistic temperament is modelled after human freedom could do otherwise.
What I am getting at is that something other than mainstream commitment is required of poets, especially when they don't voice a local political agenda. Poets, like other young professionals looking to succeed in the free market as free entities modelling careers in their chosen fields, need to adopt a more entrepreneurial approach. To some degree this will involve self-promotion and, to a large extent, self-publishing.
Poetry is essentially a specialised field within writing itself. It does not rely solely on talent or technical ability in order to distinguish itself from other forms, such as journalism or fiction writing, but has to rely, more precisely, on a measure of inspiration which the poet generally perceives as originating outside of himself. The best poets are mediums before they are writers, transcribing human archetypes, representing certain base ideals in our reality that are not normally or immediately evident to the general population, which blunders along as it so often does, concerned only with the trivial. Poets often feel they are driven by compulsion to write, and on occasion, when in peak form, to conduct elaborate symphonies of words which seem to play themselves into a pre-existing order. The greatest poets are direct conduits to the human sub- and super-consciousness, addressing matters of import to the entire race, crossing borders, genres, cultures, and political agendas.
It is for this reason - this notion that, once adept, they carry a message for humankind, a message they don't always completely understand - that the poet feels an almost desperate need to publish. In direct opposition to this need is a paradox of disinterest, shown by the human race and the industry acting as a go-between, that makes it hard, if not impossible, to get this message across, short of a tragic, formulated death. The habit of self-publishing shown by poets is a direct attempt to counter this burdening paradox, an essential aspect of poetry itself perhaps, that burns out its incumbents over time like so many wasted sheets of paper.
Professional poets seldom feel the need or, for that matter, find it necessary, to self-publish their work, barring a few initial attempts along these lines to gain the attention of respectable publishers. All things being equal this should always be the case. In South Africa the anomaly can, however, become the rule without too much prompting. Many independent publishing houses are not equipped to provide poets with what it is they feel they need in order to accomplish their Herculean task. Firstly, to publish in this country a publishing house will require funding. There is no such thing as a profitable poetry publishing experience, as any poet half done along the line will tell you. Such funding usually ends up coming from Dalro or the National Arts Council, and most government funding is presently being reserved for the black protest artists who ironically, through this act of so-called generosity, become puppets to the present regime - sponsored silence through endorsement. Very few businesses consider throwing money the way of poetry, and local publishing houses, once the shallow coffers of the government's arts treasury have been exhausted, end up approaching international institutions or sympathetic foreign concerns for the money to print a few copies.
Print runs for small or independent poetry publishing houses in this country barely extend past 1 000 copies. Many don't print more than 500. Considering that a poetry book is termed a success following the sale of 400 copies, this figure can be optimistic. Most poetry books in South Africa, after the valiant attempts by the publishers to secure distribution agreements with the large retail stores that don't resemble consignment contracts, end up remaindered to second-hand book stores where the single shelf allocated them is always full, and the sale table a final lay-by before some charitable pulping.
Given this brutal reality certain poets actually stop short of publishing their work through regular channels and consider other options, which brings us to the internet and the attempt to bypass this particular South African situation en route to the international public.
For small to medium concerns the internet works best when it is seen as a marketing tool. The product or service one is looking to sell still needs to be very much in the real world, unless you have the necessary capital to generate a new service or feature which people would consider purchasing and using online. The alternative to the standard publishing practice I am about to put forward takes this into account, but it also takes for granted that poets looking to self-publish are at the necessary stage of their career as professional poets, and that their art is sufficiently developed to warrant the financial risk such an alternative will naturally entail.
The basis of my alternative is therefore still the poetry book. Working in the book retail industry I am often confronted with customers who want to know whether the internet is adversely affecting business, to which I reply, and usually with a wry grin, that on the contrary, it has aided us tremendously. People go online to find the books they want, and the traditional book dealers are still providing them with these. The only difference now is that the competition has become more fierce, with large affiliations grouping competitors together under fixed currency standards. It is therefore highly unlikely that books themselves will become obsolete; the internet is merely another way to locate what you need. I suppose that this will remain the case, even with the advent of the e-book, which we will discuss shortly, until advances in virtual reality technologies make the act of reading a book more pleasant online than in base reality. Until you can download yourself into a matrix-style "library" programme complete with sensual attributes and every conceivable volume available at a whim or the touch of a pad, the physical act of reading will remain very much at the forefront of our intellectual and leisure activities.
The internet can be used to market a poetry product successfully, making it viable for a poet to consider the self-publishing option, and the method I am about to describe should require no more than R25 000 for an entry level operation, sans added extras such as multimedia doodahs and jpeg slash flash graphic attachments. These options, inclusions, and the nature of the detail a prospective poet wishes to incorporate in order to fulfil the particular urges of his/her imagination, unfortunately fall beyond the scope of our present discussion.
Besides the poetry book, which will account for a good portion of the above expense, the poet will also require a website. I am not about to get into the technicalities of setting up such a site, apart from confirming that this will require an outlay in direct proportion to level of professionalism sought. Development of the site, its infrastructure and functioning, can be taken care of by the poet personally, or by a professional or team of professionals, once more according to the amount of money one is willing to throw the way of the often-void, also known as the commercial viability of poetry.
One absolutely necessary requirement, given our current concern with promoting a marketable product, and therefore somehow selling it, would be the establishment of merchant agreements between yourself and the major credit institutions - Visa, Mastercard, Diners and Amex - and the purchasing and installation of the necessary encryption software in order to operate under these agreements. Some web services offer to handle these transactions for a fee. These services do, however, involve added links and irritations to a process not without its own drawbacks. It is therefore essential to keep the process of selling online as simple and user-friendly as possible in order not to alienate potential buyers.
One South African poet who has managed to create a fairly successful site to promote his own work - and in the true nature of all self-publicists, also the work of his contemporaries - is Dutch-born Joop Bersee, whose web pages on Yahoo! Geocities (www.geocities.com/joopbersee/joopbersee.html) have attracted enough traffic, it seems (if testimonies and hit counters can be trusted), to warrant the amount of time and online money he has spent getting it up and running. To my knowledge Bersee does not use this site to sell copies of work he has published, but this does not necessarily mean that he won't apply this in the future, once the site, or the work itself, supports it.
But simply publishing a book and creating a website to sell it on is not enough. Something more is required to promote and market a book to people out there in internet land who don't necessarily know that your website exists, stuck away as it is in a far corner of the information superhighway, just another billboard to nuisance the fleeting-by millions.
This is where the e-book comes in. The e-book, or e-manuscript, is quite literally what it implies, a book collected in electronic format and listed on the internet. Most e-books are posted as free downloads, although the developing trend seems to be to try and get people to pay for the more "professionally bound" copies. E-books generally make use of Adobe® technology to ensure that the document maintains its integrity across differing systems and platforms, although new programmes and applications have been introduced to cater for the emerging palmtop market. For the moment we will concern ourselves with the simple Adobe document, which will normally include bookmarks, quick links, thumbnail views of content pages and, optionally, any graphic art and eye-candy attractions to interest the reader. The most important aspect of the poetry e-book, however, is the link to your website where your poetry book is sitting paying for itself and your luxury yacht.
The e-book, once created, is not necessarily hosted on your own site, but may be hosted on other sites - as many as possible. There are e-book libraries which will agree to host your e-book - thousands of them, in fact. The single drawback here, however, is that many will ask a small fee for the favour. Your best bet as an emerging poet, self-published and self-supporting, would be local sites and friends, publishers and others in the industry who are not opposed to aiding the struggling artist. The advantage of using poetry sites as a parking space for your e-book is that the people visiting these sites are more often than not people interested in what you're selling. E-libraries can feature hundreds and thousands of e-books on various topics. Even narrowing it down to a search for poetry e-books will leave one with seemingly endless choices, from the poetry of more famous dead poets to that of your average American teenager suffering from angst and inconsequence.
For an example of a very elementary poetry e-book one can visit www.donga.co.za where (and I am sure, given the context of our present discussion you will forgive such shameless self-promotion) a poet by the name of fox has posted an e-book entitled Garamond 13. This e-book does not include any links to any sites, and the poet does not yet have a book to promote, but this does not mean that various plans are not in place. (Watch this space - click here, soon ...)
In the past I would have proposed that your e-book form part of an email promotional gambit, where the e-book is included as an attachment to a mail which tries, through good humour, dumb luck, or even cause-hijacking, to reach as many recipients as possible. The sudden proliferation of viruses on the net has, however, put paid to this concept. Many people delete unknown attachments, even when these arrive from recognised addresses; some firewalls even do this as part of their sentience training. The days of the chainletter-ebook-poetry-sales bonanza are very much behind us, I feel.
This shouldn't stop you from finding new and ingenious ways of getting your weblink under the mouse pointer of as many people as possible. Selling a poetry book on the internet is not likely to be an easy feat, although I suspect (and don't hold me to this) that sales from both regular distribution channels and the internet could reach the 400 mark, making your poetry book an undeniable success, in South Africa at least. The chances of its reaching the attention of an international audience, and thereafter an international publisher, are also much greater.
The above-detailed self-publishing alternative has great potential on paper, no doubt. It has not, to my knowledge, been tried previously, or if it has, it has not been advertised, or flaunted, as a triumph, which I admit is some slight cause for concern. But not overly - poets are generally a brave sort. All I need, before dogging it down the information alleyways of this world myself, is a kindred spirit. A volunteer, in other words ... Any takers?
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Richard Fox (fox) was born in Cape
Town in 1975 and moved to Johannesburg in 1990. He began writing in
earnest in 1992 and is presently working on his first book of verse,
which he hopes to self-publish and market internationally. He lives
and writes in Melville and works in Bedfordview as a second-hand bookstore
manager. He has taken two motorbikes through four major accidents,
boasts more internal metal than your average household, and plays
way too many computer games. Poetry suits his inward quest and thirst
for truth and meaning, and over the years he has come to respect the
word as one of the strongest driving forces behind human evolution.
He remains in the service of the Muse. His greatest works have yet
to be written. 
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