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by Martin Wroe Poetry isn't pop. It doesn't have that much of an audience. Prayer isn't pop either. It's never sold much – unless you count The Book of Common Prayer, which is a bit like a Stephen Hawking book. Everybody's got one but only a handful of specialists spend much time with it.
Put poetry and prayer together in a book and you have a recipe for something that is a sure-fire miss, a publication that will never trouble the bestseller lists. And until quite recently, the prospect of not selling many copies would have killed a publishing proposition dead. The same would have been true for certain kinds of radio or music or films. But just as the digital download and iTunes have transformed the nature of the music industry, another technical innovation might just transform the publishing world – and along the way make available a lot more prayer and poetry.
I discovered this a couple of weeks back, after realising that I had quite a collection of material I'd written for one-off specials from weddings to funerals, birthdays to church services. Often people say to me afterwards, "Hmm, what on earth was that about?" Or, "Well, that didn't really work, did it?" But occasionally they say, "Can I get a copy of that?" or "We could use that kind of thing in our place..."
According to the conventional publishing model, the kind of "meditations" I write – which float somewhere in the interface of prayer and poetry – are destined to serve a beautifully formed niche... within a niche. And until now, there hasn't been a way of reaching that niche without losing a lot of money. It's not quite elusive enough to be poetry, and it's not quite obvious enough to be what people expect prayer to be. A while back I did a couple of books the traditional way, which was very kind of the publishers, and each year they send me a neat little statement explaining through a series of complex equations why neither of the books has sold many copies.
But when someone told me about Lulu.com it dawned on me that maybe I was about to be stroked by "the long tail". (Stay with me, this might still make sense.) Something called print-on-demand has come along which, married to the rather brilliant distribution model provided by the internet, means that people like me can now publish books to our hearts' content. One at a time. With no upfront costs. And unless we want someone to market us and advertise our books – and most specialist publishers don't stretch to that anyway – we need never waste the time of a publisher again.
Two weeks after spending 90 minutes preparing, and uploading to the Lulu server, The Sky's Window (that's the name of my collection, after a line in an RS Thomas poem about prayer), the postman delivered my new book. But in fact, the publishing process was much quicker than that. Within half an hour of uploading the book, I had it on sale worldwide through my personal online "store front". If you want to buy a copy, Lulu will print one – just the one – deliver it within a week and send me 80 per cent of the profit, which is about 40 per cent of the sale price.
Anyway, I won't bore you with the ravings of a new convert. I've done that already in detail at The Sunday Times. Lulu already has thousands of authors and most, like me, will be delighted if they sell hundreds of books (for most of us it will be tens). This approach revolutionizes the existing publishing model in which a very few authors will sell millions of books. In the new paradigm it may be that millions of authors will sell a very few books.
It turns out that this is all part of a wider phenomenon christened by the editor of Wired, Chris Anderson, as The Long Tail, which might even be the "big idea" of 2006. Or maybe his publishers actually do know how to do marketing.
"There's still demand for big cultural buckets," argues Anderson, using what seems to be an American term for best-sellers. "But they're no longer the only market. The hits now compete with an infinite number of niche markets, of any size. And consumers are increasingly favoring the one with the most choice. The era of one-size-fits-all is ending, and in its place is something new, a market of multitudes."
And in the market of multitudes there is room for a book which may only reach a niche within a niche – like my new book. After a week on sale, I have sold eight copies – that's $72 into my account. Obviously I recognize that after this initial sales rush, fuelled by the pent-up enthusiasm of the members of my niche, sales will probably decline and plateau at a more realistic level. But that's alright. I wasn't looking for a best-seller anyway. I just wanted people to be able to get hold of a copy if they wanted one.
As Anderson writes, "The audience is shifting to something else, a muddy and indistinct proliferation of... well, we don't have a good term for such non-hits. They're certainly not 'misses', because most weren't aimed at world domination in the first place. They're 'everything else'."
It may not be pop, but I can now say to anyone who asks me whether they can get hold of one of those, er, "reflection things you do", that, yes, they can. If I don't have one in my bag (authors can buy in bulk at a discount) I can refer them to my storefront on Lulu. Which is here.
Martin Wroe is a Trustee of the Greenbelt Arts Festival, which takes place this weekend. He'll be reading from The Sky's Window whenever he gets a chance. New publishers have to market the work of their writers, even if they are one and the same.
Click here to read some extracts from The Sky's Window.
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