Modjaji Books generally publishes collections of poetry that have spines – no matter how slight, because that is what booksellers want.
We care what booksellers want because poets want their books in bookstores. They especially want their books in the stores that don’t care about poetry.
Our distributor/marketing people want to sub everything we publish to all the bookstores they work with.
We want to keep our distributor happy, we want to keep the poets happy, we want to keep the booksellers happy.
(The bookstores that don’t really care about poetry will return a great deal of the poetry they buy, all bought on SOR – sale or return. Pardon me if none of this is poetic.)
Poets want their books in bookstores because that means their book is really real.
We don’t usually publish chapbooks as debut collections because we consider the Ingrid Jonker Poetry Prize.
We publish slim volumes of poems because these are taken more seriously by ‘the poetry establishment’.
The ‘poetry establishment’ takes slim volumes more seriously than: collections which contain the work of several poets, chapbooks, online publications, e-books, oral poetry.
Remind me again, who is the ‘poetry establishment’?
As publishers we consider everything we can, including publishing online, on phones, in pamphlets, as posters, on T-shirts, but so far we mostly stuck to the tried and tested technology of traditional book publishing on paper.
I find myself wincing when I hear poetry described as “content” and reading poetry described as “consuming” and publishing anything being described as “content delivery”. Is it a generational thing?
There is nothing more enlivening, nothing fresher, nothing that affects me as deeply as hearing a wonderful poet read her work. I’m thinking today of Jackie Kay.
Google Jackie Kay, google her reading “Fiere” – there are quite a few options on YouTube.
You’re welcome.