Easy Rhymes and Trashy Romances

Recently, my marketing/business manager (aka The Hubs) did some research on poetry books that are selling well on Amazon. He was hoping to learn how better to market my latest release (and first-ever poetry collection), Songs in the Gate. One thing he gained from this exercise was the disappointing realization that many of the popular and successful poetry books were full of feel-good, low-quality, mass-consumer poetry.

I was not surprised when he shared this with me, for I have made similar observations in prose. I subscribe to the blog of an author named Nick Stephenson who specializes in helping other authors market their work. Frequently, he shares success stories of authors who have self-published their way to solvency. Seventy-five percent of the time I have clicked on these stories, excited to read further and learn the secrets of such impressive and desirable success, I have found the same list of disheartening characteristics:

~ The author writes fifteen to twenty books a year.

~ All of these books have similar titles, like Passion’s Pride, Passion’s Revenge, Passion’s Kiss, Passion: The Reckoning. (You guessed it: they are all about a girl – or guy – named Passion.)

~ Most of the covers feature (predominantly) a man’s naked torso. (Not even his face. Never his face. Just the abs – all twenty-six of them.)

It’s enough to make an aspiring scribe of myth and meditative wonder put her heavy head into her weary hands and weep.

Or, even worse, to contemplate the following:

Maybe I should toss off a few of these soap operas under a fake name, just to make some cash, and then carry on with my real work.

I could, you know. I have a hyperdeveloped sense of the romantic and a scary knack for the maudlin and the melodramatic. When I was fifteen, I entered and WON a serialized soap opera story contest sponsored by Noritake china. The winnings made a lovely wedding present to my sister. #truestory

Fear not: I don’t think I ever will enact this scheme. Still, the question remains: how can a hopeful wordsmith like myself build a lucrative career when the majority of the consuming public seems to want only easy rhymes and trashy romances?

NOTE: Please, please don’t think that I am condemning all forms of pleasant, easy, formulaic entertainment as worthless.

Sometimes, one simply must relax and embrace the familiar. Example: in my house, the characters from The Office and Parks & Rec are practically family. My husband and I have had multiple conversations entirely in quotes from these witty, delightful, heartfelt comedies. I just started re-watching Parks & Rec from the beginning (again), and it is taking every bit of willpower I have to sit here now and write these words to you instead of sliding on over to Netflix for an hour with Leslie Knope and her gang of winsome misfits. I mean, I just reached the end of season two, so Chris and Ben just showed up.

Need I say more?