Poetry Book Publishers

Interested in poetry book publishers? Learn how to target the right one for you and discover which self publishing houses might be a great alternative.

Finding Poetry Book Publishers that are Right for You

While these days there are very few individual poets who gain national or international renown, the art is actually thriving on a grand scale. Yes, there aren’t many gigantic luminaries, but at the same time there are more companies publishing poetry books than ever. This includes major publishing companies, independent poetry book publishers, and people who are out there self-publishing and publishing books for their friends. Thanks to the hard work of all these people and companies, poetry has entered a new era of seemingly endless possibilities.

Of course, as you probably already know, you’re not going to make any money off of your book. This may seem like a bad thing, but most poetry purists consider it great. After all, poetry is the most artistic of literary genres, and commerce tends to corrupt art. Thus, one of the things that makes today’s poetry so great is that poets start out knowing that they’re not going to get rich from their work. This allows them to keep the art of their work first and foremost in their minds.

Now that we got the no-money issue out of the way, let’s talk about how you can get your book published.

First and most importantly, what you have to do is familiarize yourself with the current world of poetry. This is no small feat, as there are now more poets, more poetry movements, and, yes, more poetry book publishers than ever. In short, it would be humanly impossible to read all the poetry books that are published in a given year.

However, what you can do is read a representative sampling of all the work that is out there. You can’t just go to your bookstore or library, as these places rarely carry anything more than the classic poetry or the few contemporary poets with widespread recognition. Instead, what you need to do is look into poetry journals.

You can find a few poetry journals at the bookstore, but going online can be even more productive. Most poetry journals publish at least some of their content online, which allows you to get a sampling of the type of work they like to accept. If you like it, order the journal online.

Once you have a few journals to read through, keep a list of your favorite poets. If you check their bios in the back of the journals, you can find out whether they have books—which, again, you probably won’t find at the bookstore, but you can get them online. And when they don’t have books, you can usually find out where else they’ve been published, which will help you to expand into reading other journals that you didn’t know about.

In any case, as you go through this process, you’ll begin to become aware of certain poetry book publishers that seem to release a lot of work that you like. From here, the rest of the process is self-explanatory. Once you have your manuscript ready, send it out to the poetry book publishers that you think would accept your work.