The Bookshow with Graham Beattie and Carole Beu reveals promising signs for Independent Booksellers and small Publishers. You can watch last night’s episode here where they talk to the Publisher of Upstart Press and Jenna from Timeout Bookstore.

One interesting point made was the continued growth in non-fiction and children’s books and the signal that fiction might digitalise more and more.

I know a lot of poetry books get published in New Zealand by a range of presses as I have such a stack in my study to share on this blog (more than I can possibly do), but I wonder how they go in terms of sales. Poetry is rarely a strong feature in a bookshop (I have made a separate page on Poetry Box for all the stores that have great displays of children’s poetry) and maybe that’s because we don’t buy that much of it. Ahh!

I still believe the life of poetry in book form will endure because we pay so much attention to the book as object, the hold of the book in the hand, the look of the poem on the page, the cover and so on.