Ever Wondered About Poetry Bestsellers?

Jim Behrle lays it out for you.

Weekly, the good folks at Harriet put up a post that links back to a list of poetry bestsellers. Where does this list come from? Is this a Publishers' Weekly bestseller list? Does the Poetry Foundation create a list? The word "bestseller" is a dicey supposition to begin with, across any genre. The New York Times bestseller list does ask many bookstores to report their own bestseller lists to contribute to the numbers. But a New York Times bestseller doesn't usually mean more customers bought #1 than #2. When a warehouse at a distributor replenishes another warehouse at a chain, that could count as bestseller numbers. And it's up to the individual reporting store to decide how to report to the New York Times. If a reporting store had events that particular week with Carl Hiaasen and Sloane Crosley, guess who will be at the top of their Bestseller List? Neilsen's Bookscan does not take into account sales at Walmart or Sam's Clubs or most independents. Many small independents either don't have the ability to report or don't wish to share sales info with potential competitors. Do Amazon sales # compute in people who buy new books used by some of the small stores that sell on Amazon? Probably not.

To look at a Bestseller List one assumes that all books were equally represented as possibilities for sales. But most of the Bestseller games are won in brick and mortar environments in Stock and Placement. Which is why the list Harriet highlights is filled with major publishers, the Bukowskis and Mary Olivers. These are the books generally on display, with more than one copy. Not the lone copy of a poetry book that is spined out in a small poetry section. If a publisher pays for a book to be well-displayed it will be in the major chains and some smaller indies. More.

Comments

Charles Rammelkamp

Doped with Religion, Sex and TV “Working class hero, my foot,” Darleen spat. “Pampered British rock star’s more like it. He don’t know nothin’ about no working class,” she sneered, “and that Jap witch he married. She’s probly the one who put them ideas in his head.” Darleen and I worked on the assembly line at the Capitol Records plant, putting fresh-pressed LPs into sleeves, the packaged albums into cardboard boxes, the boxes onto pallets for the forklift guy to take them away to the loading dock. “I used to like some of them early songs. ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ but you can have this stuff. Working class hero! Who does he think he’s kidding?” I stuffed my impulse to defend Lennon, point out his poverty in postwar Liverpool, the broken family, the absent sailor father; mainly offended by Doreen’s naked racism, pitying her for the misogyny she’d absorbed from generations of farmers on the prairie. I was a college student, working part...

Karl Koweski

retaliation it was two weeks after you returned from rehab, dad I found the first vodka bottle, a Smirnoff pint, stashed beneath the driver's seat of your Ford. I propped the empty on the dashboard like a bobble-head. I didn't tell you this then, but... going into my room and leaving my dog-eared copies of Penthouse on my pillow next to the Vaseline... that was a pretty good comeback. Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Day now living in a valley in rural Alabama. His latest collection of poetry from Roadside Press "Abandoned By All Things" is out now.

PRYING, Jack Micheline, Charles Bukowski, Catfish McDaris, a Review

Roadside Press $18.00 https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/prying/71 Limited Edition of 69 The three poets nesting cheek by jowl in this fetching 2022 reprint of the 1997 Four-Sep Publications chapbook Prying from small press dynamo Michele McDannold's Roadside Press will be familiar to anyone paying attention to even the tiniest of the outlaw poetry scene in the last 50 or so years: Charles Bukowski, Catfish McDaris and Jack Micheline. Bukowski and Micheline need little introduction; their long shadows hover over the outlaw poetry world even now years after their deaths. And the third, the only living poet of the three within, Catfish McDaris, has been building his own small press reputation with considerable success, for nearly as long as the former men. Illustrations are from Scott Aicher. It's most fun to talk about the living McDaris. He appeared and appears so widely it's difficult to keep track and critique, or not, but as his portion of the cover copy says, he doesn...

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