Some Musings on My Book Contest Stats: The Chapbooks

On a bit of a whim last night I decided to calculate how much money I’ve invested with the poetry book award contests since I started sending out my manuscripts in 2004.  Bless the organizational skills I inherited from my mother, I’ve  actually kept spreadsheets with all this raw data.  At first I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the damage, but now that I have tracked all the numbers it’s actually not that bad.  I have no illusions about the business of it all, and since I do consider this an investment, not just in my future but the future of other poets and poetry presses, I thought I’d be candid and share some of this data.  This post will take a look at the breakdown for my chapbooks:

Pear Slip

I sent Pear Slip out to chapbook contests a total of seven times, from 2004 to 2006.  It was a Finalist in two of those contests (Slapering Hol and DIAGRAM/NMP) and came in fourth in the Frank O’Hara contest before winning Spire’s contest in 2006.  The only change I made to the manuscript from its original conception was the addition of the “Pear Poetics” preface, composed in 2006 and included when I sent the manuscript out that last time to Spire.  Guess it did the trick!  Total money invested in contest fees: $92.00.  Prize money from winning Spire’s contest $500.

Narcissus Resists

I sent Narcissus Resists out to a total of nine chapbook contests, from 2005 to 2007.  It was a Semi-finalist for the Frank O’Hara contest and an “Also Notable” top fiver for the Caketrain Contest before it won the 2007 Beauty/Truth contest.  Beauty/Truth subsequently disappeared with no trace in 2008, so I officially “withdrew” the mss and started sending it out again, three more places, for a total of twelve when Didi at MiPO kindly rescued it in early 2009.  As for changes to the mss, I changed up the order of the sonnets once to tighten the narrative, right before it won the Beauty/Truth contest.  Total money invested in contest fees: $129.00.  Total royalties I’ve made so far from sales via CreateSpace: $40.95.

Platos de Sal

I sent Platos de Sal to a total of four chapbook contests, from 2006 to 2008.  It was a Runner-up for the Frank O’Hara contest and a Finalist in both the Keystone and Robin Becker contests before Ron extended the offer to publish it in the Editor’s Series at Seven Kitchens.  Minor edits as we prepared the final text, but no significant changes to title or text.  One of the few poems I’ve written that is pretty much in its original state.  Total money invested in contest fees: $59.  And I have a generous number of copies I can sell directly on my own (that’s one thing I haven’t kept track of with all three chapbooks, how many copies I’ve sold directly to people; I’m sure if I really picked my brain I could probably guesstimate, but it’s not really worth it to me).

Looking at these numbers, I seem to have a pattern of debuting a new chapbook project each year and a two-year turnaround of sending it out before publication acceptance, which is reaffirming.  It also reaffirmed for me the investment was totally worth the outcome, but less because of any money I may have made or lost.  Securing homes for my work, seeing a project through from idea to finished product, and having all those hours of composition and revision and sequencing manifested in a physical object that others can then experience, hold and own and read, is something to which I can’t affix any price.  It’s nice when the thing you love to do can earn you some money, but that’s not why I write or why I choose to send my work to these contests.

One of my grad school friends recently told me she stopped publishing and worrying about publishing when she realized she didn’t want to teach and didn’t need those creds for a CV.  It made me pause because I also don’t teach and have no interest in teaching, but I’ve never connected teaching to publishing in that way.  I publish because my books are very real creatures to me that I want living out there in the world.  They are snapshots of my thoughts and concerns and obsessions, physical products of my mental processes, and like with paintings, I want to share my “way of seeing” the world with others.

I understand the fees–for processing, for paying guest judges, for publishing the winning book and sometimes the prize money for the winner, for keeping the press afloat.  I’m okay paying them.  I have the means to pay them.  Do I think the fees may be prohibitive to poets who don’t have the resources to pay?  Yes, and that worries me.  At $25 a pop on average that adds up fast.  I think I’ve become smarter over the years about what I send and to where, but it’s still an investment, and while I can pay, what about those who can’t?

There are alternatives to this contest system: publishing collectives, self-publishing, making your own or your friend’s books via letterpress or computer, lovingly hand-tying the pages together.  There’s a long tradition of poets founding presses to publish the work of their comrades.  There are others more directly involved with this tradition who could speak more eloquently about it than I, but I will confess it’s a direction I ponder more and more.  With the POD services available out there, why not find a co-conspirator and found a press and get my friends’ work out there, allowing more voices to join the conversation in print?

I have more thoughts on this which I’ll devote time to in a future post when I take a look at my full-length manuscript projects.  The numbers are much higher there, especially for The Erotic Postulate which, as it enters its seventh year in search of a good home, I’ve sent out about 83 times (that includes open reading periods without fees).  I won’t tell you how much I’ve spent on that baby (yet), but it has a good track record of placing in contests, so not all bad.  That post will also go into a little more detail about the evolution of those manuscripts, how the sequencing morphed, titles changed, etc.