When I read P&W, I sense exactly the atmosphere you are speaking of. Packaging. Selling.

BTW. I noticed in an ad that the incomparable Rhina was guest faculty at the MFA at Ashland University.

How's that message for honing my publicist skills?

Carrie Bradshaw had one in Sex and the City. That's all you really need to know.

A poet and his publicist
Spent every evening getting pissed*
And that is why his sales were low.
I thought you people ought to know.

*UK usage

The poet and the publicist
had made a pact to make a list
of every every place the book was not
on a shelf or being bought.

Cyn, I addressed that problem on my own behalf by sneaking copies of one of my collections into major bookshops and parking it on the poetry shelves. The highlight of the exercise was when I was caught in the act in Borders (now no more) in Charing Cross Road in London. A young man asked me what I was doing and when I said innocently that "I'm trying to put this book (back!) on the shelf up there" he took it from me and put it there himself - between Dryden and Duffy. He thought he was doing a good deed for a little old lady. And he was, he was...

Ann, that was a creative way to get out of tight spot.

But this modus operandi means that you didn't get any money for a sold book?

Walter. I have never seen Sex and the City and hope I never do. But if I weren't so anti-television, I would have known about "publicists", wouldn't I?

John and Cyn. That sounds like a cool challenge for John's turf--writing about the entourage (love that word) a writer needs--publisher, editor, agent, publicist. Maybe also a spouse with a day job and an encouraging mother to feed one, and an arranger of poetry readings (what is the latter called?) and a computer geek to tell you to check that all the cables are connected.

Janice, this may be off-topic but I was reading an article today that reminded me of this thread. In connection with what Nemo wrote above, it made me think on how people in po-biz perhaps feel compelled to follow the current trend, which is commercialization or marketing or publicizing of everything. Marketers as the unacknowledged legislators of humankind. The author calls this the "first principle of modern marketing":

To make customers is the new problem. One must understand not only his own business--the manufacture of a particular product--but also the structure, the personality, the prejudices, of a potentially universal public.

It's interesting to think on it, especially since the internet has made self-publicity so much more, um, widespread. Most poets, I guess, are their own publicists via web pages etc.

That's interesting, Andrew, and not off-topic at all, IMO.

As a wannabe writer I couldn't possibly afford to follow the trends.

As a still-around reader, I long ago lost faith in the official rating systems.

I am especially wary of books on the bestseller list because they are usually as empty of content as popcorn of nourishment. And they usually have made the list because the publisher has done a bulldozer marketing campaign or Ophrah has blessed a book she perhaps has read or both.

I am very wary of "pseudo-reviews". As far as I am concerned, the so-called reviews on book-selling sites are like those old ads for patent medicine which were disguised as "news". I don't mind if someone in say, their blog, reports that "my friend" just wrote the most fantastic book and you should read it", because that is full transparancy. I instinctively trust that person more than an "anonymous", perhaps self-written, review on the site that sells the book .

It resembles a confidence game perpetuated by a publicist litterati based in Nigeria.

The way I mostly choose to buy books of poetry is if I have seen a poem somewhere that knocked the socks of me. I think, for instance, of Daljit Nagra whose book I snatched up immediately when I saw it on the shelf in an Edinburgh bookshop, because I had read ONE poem by him in a magazine and been so impressed that I copied it and had it lying on the coffee table until it disappeared in some inscrutable stack of papers. But I remembered the name. No clerk at the cash register had heard of him or anyone else in the queue. (I was of course bigmouthing my find as I paid.) But just because I liked it, doesn't mean anyone else would. Still, it was a no-strings attached recommendation from my side.

Wiki is good if you keep your head screwed on right. But there too we find are many seemingly factual, self-written pages about self-proclaimed, self-publicized greats.

In short, I am a suspicious old biddy, and it's getting worse.

But you know what this quote made me think of:

I am reminded that a "potentially universal public" is what a good workshop environment (like the Sphere) can provide. It really is fantastic that we can manufacture and post a poem here and get access to opinions from a widely diverse readership.

Andrew, if you want to avoid getting really depressed, don't read Chris Hamilton-Emery's book on making poems sell: chapter upon chapter of relentless marketing advice for poets, much of it internet focused. It all has the aim of teaching poets to be their own publicists--because, after all, the publisher needs to recover costs.

After reading it, I started to see everything as a marketing gimmick, however much I'd enjoyed those interactions in the past. Boards, blogs, even e-zines started to look like nothing more than ways for the poet to magnify his/her name.

But back to Janice....

Oh, Maryann, that was interesting. That was really depressing. That was scary. I would never buy a book with that title. But I'll bet my bottom doughnut that a lot of people have.

I think I am starting to break out in a rash from this thread.