As a regular reader of new poetry, by what means do you decide which books you want to buy? And how easily do you find those books?

Your answer to the first question might include reading magazines like this, hunting out rare national press reviews of new poetry books, subscribing to membership of the Poetry Book Society or trawling Amazon.co.uk on a regular basis. But unless you get hold of all the books you want from the PBS, or live near a bookshop run by a knowledgeable enthusiast who keeps a comprehensive stock of poetry, the answer to the second is most likely to be Not Very. Or even Not At All.

And while I could easily exhort you to remedy your book-finding problems by making all your purchases via the PBS, the fact that poetry stock in the average high street bookshop is so limited is a very serious concern. So serious, in fact, that organisations like the PBS, along with publishers and other booksellers, must try to set aside our partisan and competitive instincts and take a long hard look at ways of keeping poetry books in the public eye.

The appalling problems faced by publishers trying to get new poetry titles into shops are well-known: the big chains have hiked up the discounts they demand from publishers, bookshops are stocked entirely on a profit-led basis and it’s often left to independent bookshops to cater for wider reading tastes. When poetry does appear it frequently occupies a sad little ghetto on the third floor; there are no promotions to entice readers to the shelves and no incentives to encourage purchases — when did you last see a book of poetry in a ‘3 for 2’ offer? Without guidance such as national press reviews, point of sale information, ‘manager’s recommendations’ etc. the average reader takes one squint at the spines of slim volumes, whose titles are barely legible from two feet away, and scarpers.

The problem is by no means limited to poetry books by unknown writers published by small presses; the above scenario is played out in front of shelves full of Armitage, Duffy, Heaney, RS Thomas — all of whose work the PBS sells in quantities — and imprints such as Faber, Picador and Cape suffer along with the subsidised houses like Anvil, Bloodaxe and Carcanet and the smaller independent presses such as Arc, Peepal Tree and Smith Doorstop.

A reluctance on all sides to accept that all publishers of poetry are essentially in the same boat when it comes to getting books into shops has prevented any real dialogue about how to tackle the problem taking place. The commercial houses suspect that the subsidised sector is being propped up by public money; the independents envy the marketing resources of the big US-owned imprints. But my recent discussions with publishers from both ‘sides’ have turned up a plethora of shared experiences and suggest that they have more in common than anyone knows, particularly on the issue of marketing their books both to retailers and to readers.

Rebecca Carter, of Chatto, a Random House imprint whose list includes Ruth Padel, John Fuller, Bernard O’Donoghue and Fred D’Aguiar, explains the pitfalls of marketing poetry:

‘Publicizing poetry and especially convincing bookshops to stock it demands a pretty in-depth understanding of the contemporary poetry scene. Although there are several poetry enthusiasts in our marketing and sales departments who work hard on the poetry list, this is perhaps more by chance than design: marketing and sales people are employed by Random House to work on a huge range of very different kinds of book, so a love of poetry is not necessarily the top criteria for giving them the job. The demise of poetry buyers in the major book chains means that a sales rep is often trying to sell a poetry title to a buyer who knows nothing about poetry and who has it low down on their list of priorities. Unless our sales rep has very good arguments at his or her fingertips as to why a book should be stocked, it is unlikely to be.’

Compare that to these comments from Simon Thirsk, Finance Manager of Bloodaxe Books. Bloodaxe is the UK’s most prolific poetry publisher, it receives public funding and its staff have in-depth knowledge of their product:

‘Faber, Picador, Carcanet, Bloodaxe, we’re all being marginalized by bookshops who don’t want to stock titles which won’t bring in the level of return their managements now demand…..so unless we can get people to come in and buy poetry, the bookshops won’t stock it.’

Different perspectives, but the same essential issue about supply and demand and the difficulty of getting books into shops —which is where the vicious circle begins — low poetry sales being seen as low demand for poetry which leads to low stocks of poetry….and so on, ad nauseam.

So what can we do? I suggest we need to use the similarities outlined above — note Thirsk’s effortless mention of four very different publishers in the same breath.We need to convince all poetry publishers that we have to work together to expand the market for poetry. Not just to increase each publisher’s own booksales — a small percentage upturn in sales for one poetry publisher isn’t going to make a dent in the general downturn of the market — but to work towards more people buying more poetry books.

We need to research the current market, discover how publishers sell their books and in what quantities, at what costs. We need to find out who buys what poetry and why and how; how frontlist sales compare with backlist, and what ‘crossover’ marketing oppportunities we may be missing by ignoring, for example, existing purchasers of classic verse, popular anthologies and even contemporary fiction. We need to look at the feasibility of specialist poetry reps offering ‘capsule shelves’ of well-chosen poetry books to the large bookshop chains, or of carrying out promotions across a range of titles from all sorts of publishers. We should take a look at non-bookshop sales opportunities too, from the internet and good old mail order. And at the centre of all this activity we should remember that in order for the many to benefit, all kinds of publishers will need to co-operate.

The PBS has been awarded a modest grant from the Arts Council of England (ACE) to begin Phase 1 of just such a research process. We hope to report back on our initial findings this autumn, and to suggest a variety of practical ideas for actual projects which will be sufficiently flexible to allow collaboration between all sorts of publishers and retailers.

Until last year ACE made a substantial annual grant of around £100,000 to Signature, a Manchester-based company which undertook to represent a dozen or so small press imprints and deal with their sales into shops and via other retail outlets. Signature and ACE have since parted company, and some of the publishers (including both fiction and poetry presses) who lost their sales reps in the process have formed a new organisation which looks set to receive at least a chunk of the original grant. Good luck to them, but however successful the new consortium is, it’s not going to be enough to turn the tide on its own.

Independent presses traditionally take the risks in poetry publishing — new voices, experimental styles, the untried and the unknown often reach the public via small press publications. But poetry imprints of commercial houses take their own risks, fighting for space amongst their own much more lucrative fiction titles, with the pressure on sales figures being ever-present. It’s reductive for these two vital strands of poetry publishing to consider themselves enemies, or even simply as competitors — because if they continue to fight for the same £8 from your pocket, there will still only be one sale. Until a keen fan of Wendy Cope (Faber) can run her finger along the shelves to alight upon work by Julia Copus (Bloodaxe), then Sarah Corbett (Seren) and along to Robert Crawford (Cape) or Ian Crichton-Smith (Carcanet) and so on, then she’s not being offered a genuine choice. And until she feels confident enough to explore and expand her poetry tastes, all of us — poets, publishers and retailers — will suffer.

Poetry book buyers will always be a minority, so let’s not be unrealistic about the potential market, but with some serious strategic cooperation between publishers and retailers it could be a much more sizeable minority than it is at present. It’s time for poetry publishers to set aside their differences and work together for their own benefit and for you, as readers and poets, and for the future of published poetry in Britain.

To obtain a free copy of the the most recent issue of the Poetry Book Society’s Bulletin, or for information about the PBS’s services to readers of poetry, please email info@poetrybooks.co.uk, or telephone 020 8870 8403, or check out the relaunched PBS website at www.poetrybooks.co.uk.