Poetry: The Bestselling Category for IngramSpark

Social media has sparked a younger generation’s interest in poetry and increased print sales in that genre

For a few years now, you’ve probably seen headlines touting the growth of poetry books; that growth has been driven by Instapoets and a younger generation of readers. The sales of Rupi Kaur, the biggest Instapoet of them all, helped double poetry sales in 2017. Twelve of the top 20 bestselling poetry authors that year were Instapoets.

Andrews McMeel, based in Kansas City, is so far the leading publisher of such authors; it accounts for 40 percent of the US poetry market. But most Instapoets begin by self-publishing, and we recently learned that poetry is the bestselling category for IngramSpark, Ingram’s distribution service for indie authors. (Ingram is the world’s largest wholesale book distributor.)

We spoke with Robin Cutler, the director of IngramSpark, to learn more about this trend. She says the growth began about four to five years ago and that it hasn’t stopped since. “It’s surprising even to us,” she says, but the young poets can find their audience easily—they’re out there and they’re hungry for poetry. “I think it’s a renaissance … like the romantic poets of the 1800s. Maybe poetry always is popular when the world is chaotic.” Cutler says that while self-help and memoir remain strong sellers for IngramSpark, as does business, poetry exceeds them. Both title count and the volume of sales is increasing, primarily in paperback and ebook formats.

Cutler says IngramSpark has been able to amplify the poets’ efforts. For example, Haitian-American author Pierre A. Jeanty broke out with his collection Her, which is a tribute to women. “It was the perfect book at the perfect time,” Spark said, since it arrived just as the #metoo movement was emerging. The book’s popularity led to Target contacting Ingram, and IngramSpark then helped facilitate distribution to the chain. Jeanty tried to return the favor of Target’s support by telling his audience to buy the book at Target—and he secretly signed books that were in the store. “He understood the merchandising part of selling books,” Cutler says. IngramSpark helped him supply the retailer largely using print-on-demand, through the same core service that any indie author can use. As needed, IngramSpark could tap into the larger power of Ingram to rise to the challenge of meeting Target’s needs. And Jeanty isn’t an outlier; Cutler mentioned other authors, such as Robert M. Drake, who have poetry books aimed at a social media audience that are selling well through independent bookstores and Barnes & Noble.

At London Book Fair, Kirsty Melville, president and publisher of Andrews McMeel, spoke about the current popularity of poetry around the world, claiming that the desire of poetry fans to own print collections has led many of them into bookstores for the first time to browse. Furthermore, the rise of poetry has led to increased numbers of live events and poetry slams, offering authors another way to sell books and earn revenue.

Bottom line: Prior to the era of social media, poetry was most often discussed as something that needed to be saved. Now, you’ll find some who claim that Instapoetry is destroying the art form, while others argue that it has revived it. Regardless of how you see it, one thing is certain: this new generation of poets has found a way to marry art and commerce and meaningfully engage an audience willing to pay for books.