Happy National Poetry Month--We Need Your Support More Than Ever Before
April is National Poetry Month and our team has been busy spreading the word about the books that are all things poetry. If you didn’t know, we publish more poetry than any other genre every year. It’s our bread and butter; it’s our jam. We’d like to keep making books, but the struggle to keep a small press going forward in this environment is real. We’ll have a chat about that further down in the newsletter. This month’s newsletter will be all about poetry, cover reveals, recent book releases, upcoming book releases, and events coming your way.
We should dig right in.
NATIONAL POETRY MONTH
National Poetry Month looks a lot like a commercial grab, and it can be, but for us it’s a helpful beacon guiding readers to poetry who would otherwise not pick it up. Poetry is an art that stems as far back as 3,000 BCE (probably even older). It has long carried with it stories and history of love, sorrow, and the banalities of the everyday. Poetry seeks to express what we cannot express. It evaluates the somethings and the nothings.
Most of all, poetry satisfies. To celebrate, we are offering our poetry collections at a discount not only on our website but also with other retailers. Here are some of the places to get steals:
Our Website
In addition to immediate price discounts, we are offering free shipping on our website for orders $50+. Some of the books of poetry we are loving right now are: Even the Milky Way Is Undocumented by Amy Shimshon-Santo, Are You Ready to Love Yourself a Black Man by Kris Amos, VENTRIC[L]E by Jerrod E. Bohn, and kiss & release by Anthony DiPietro.
Bookshop.org
Bookshop.org is our second favorite place to send our readers to buy books. That’s because they donate a lot of the profit to indie booksellers to help them stay afloat. We ask that if you are not going to buy books from our site, please consider doing your book shopping at bookshop.org.
Amazon
Maybe you have prime or are just a diehard Amazon super shopper—we know nothing we say will get you to stop shopping on the ‘zon, so we also have our books and merch listed on Amazon. There are deals all month long over there. You can also find our books at Target, Barnes and Noble, and many many many independent bookstores.
The merch we recently dropped on Amazon (through the Amazon Merch program) is quirky and fun to wear. We designed a few with National Poetry Month in mind in addition to several that are advocacy shirts to support small presses. The proceeds from the sales of these purchases directly support our advertising and marketing efforts. It’s never enough, but it helps immensely. When you sport one of our designs you accomplish two things: spread the word about our press and support our mission to continue publishing books by the underrepresented and overlooked.
A CALL FOR HELP
No one likes to ask for help, and we have worked tirelessly to stay afloat with the current profit from sales and donations from a few staunch supporters, but it’s simply not enough. Our press has always relied on the philanthropic support of readers, writers, booksellers, librarians, and the like to keep our ambitious mission alive. But we also have never asked for money without giving something back in exchange (some donors support us without required reciprocity). The small press world is a collaborative effort.
Every year, the cost of this business rises and with the current shrinking of the book distro market, we are feeling the squeeze caused by the sudden closure of Small Press Distribution. We’ve never worked with SPD because of so so many reasons, but we are being heavily impacted by their decision to close down without notice. How? The books that SPD warehoused and handled have now been thrown into warehouses at Ingram where are books are stored—this is causing major warehousing/shipping issues for us. Not only that, we are in the middle of changing the way we distribute our books to readers, and the one non-exclusive independent book distributor we wanted to work with can’t take us on because of the presses that were left without a distributor. We get it. They need help. They have to come first. And hopefully in the future we can partner up to continue our mission forward. For now, there’s nothing we can do about it.
As our team sat around the proverbial virtual table hashing out how we can increase revenue to pay back debts of previous books while also building a fund to support the next 2-3 years’ worth of book releases, there was a bit of a silent moment. Fear, even. We’re selling the same amount of books this year as 2022, and that’s a good thing given that 2023 was not a great “selling” year for our press. With our publisher healed and working like a fiending monster, everything is getting back to business as usual. It is not perfect and not an overnight recovery, but we are getting there. But that doesn’t change the fact that the cost to bring a book into the world, and do it well, is too much fucking money. The cost keeps going up but we are making the same amount of money per title…so with every sale, we’re making less than we were a year ago (we will be releasing a post about how much it now costs to produce/advertise/market a book this year…prepare to have your jaw picked up off the floor). Point blank, we may not have enough capital to get us through to 2026. It’s that serious.
Today, we’re here to ask you to become a staunch supporter of Unsolicited Press. But we do not want your money for nothing. We calculated it, and if at least half of our newsletter subscribers changed from a free plan to a yearly paid plan for our substack, we could guarantee the future of our press from now until 2028.
What would you get in return for forking over financial loyalty? We settled on a few things to start (these items are further outlined in the paid section at the bottom of this newsletter):
Scheduled AMAs with our publisher and authors.
Our publisher will hold exclusive AMAs every 1st Wednesday of each month starting in May. Paid subscribers will receive an invite the week beforehand.
We will set up AMAs with authors and invite subscribers to those. These will be informal and a Q+A style with a brief reading from the author. These will be scheduled based on the authors’ needs.
Paid subscribers will be able to chat with us on the Substack platform about anything they want. We will have the substack chat open daily.
As of July 1, all paid substack subscribers will have access to our Reader Review program, enabling readers to read ANY of our titles without paying. All we ask is that you leave an honest review of the book somewhere like Goodreads, Amazon, Target, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
2025 Book Box Giveaway: we are going to give one paid subscriber (a $400 value).
Polls that help us choose covers for upcoming books.
Free audiobooks as often as possible.
Free shipping on all of our books when ordered on our website while you are a paid subscriber (this feature goes into effect on 5/1/2024).
We really need your support so we can continue to publish books from authors who deserve to have their works out there. There will be many more perks to being a paid subscriber as the months go on, but these are where we’d like to start. Your support is appreciated, needed, and respected. If you have other perk ideas to add to the list, feel free to tell us about them. Thank you so much.
2025 COVER REVEALS
As 2025 grows near, we are putting the final touches on our 2025 covers. As you all know, 2025 is different from our typical publishing cycles because we are only publishing womxn. But, we are also connecting all the books through color on the covers (and there’s a surprise in the books too!). In July, we will begin revealing the covers for our books on a monthly basis. However, we couldn’t wait to share ONE with you.
What do you think of it?
APRIL BOOK RELEASES
All of our April books are not out in the world and we wanted to share them with you in case you missed them. We published a novel and an essay collection this month, both by women that are really fucking special. Yvonne is the woman who will make you laugh no matter what is happening, and Linda is the fiercest animal lover we’ve ever met. Please consider reading their books.
UPCOMING ADVANCE REVIEW COPIES NOW AVAILABLE ON LIBRARYTHING
We post a lot of our titles on LibraryThing before they are released to get some amazing advance reviews. It requires you to sign up—FREE— and then you can enter yourself into the giveaways in hopes of receiving a copy. Next month, we are offering two books for you to receive for free:
If you’d like to be considered to review one of these titles, please click on either of them to be taken to LibraryThing.
UPCOMING EVENTS & DEADLINES
4/27/24: Yvonne Osborne at Eras Bookstore - book signing
5/15: 2024 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize & James Laughlin Award Deadline
9/29-10/1: PNBA Trade Show
11/1-11/2: Portland Book Festival
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