The PBS boasts that it's poetry book of the month sells 2,500 copies. I would be a very very happy small publisher - who has never taken and would never take any form of public subsidy - if I could be sure I would sell a guaranteed 2,500 copies of a book every month. That is a nice little profit, as any publisher kno.
Market forces should prevail here as they have to with me. If people want to buy poetry they will, if they don`t they won't - same as with any other kind of book.If you can't make a profit, you should close. But 2,500 a month guaranteed sale means they damn well ought not to need a penny of our money.

The full facts about the Poetry Book Society and the TS Eliot Prize have not been widely revealed in the public domain. Each quarter the PBS Choice generates guaranteed purchases of around 2000 copies for the single chosen collection of poetry. For Arts Council England subsidised publishers, like Caracanet and Bloodaxe Books (who frequently benefit from a 'Choice')this generates additional revenue. For commercial publishing house like Faber, Cape and Picador ( who also regularly benefit from a Choice) this reduces their commercial risk in publishing poetry, which itself is a very unpopular genre in the booktrade.

In addition each quarterly Choice guarantees a shortlisting plus £1000 for each author in the TS Eliot Prize. It's hardly surprising that the authors are writing furiously to the brodsheet press, but they surley have a vested interest here, as do the publishers who are also signatories to much of this noise.

The real shame is that - apart from their avarice for taxpayers funds - their dependency culture on subsidy has blinded them to the public antipathy for poetry and also prevented legitimate and excellent poets interested in developing new audiences winning wider recognition. The Aerts Council should stick to its guns and alow a new wave of poets and progressive publishers to emerge.

Susan, you seem to be under a misapprehansion that the PBS is a publisher. It is a book club, founded long ago by TS Eliot and Stephen Spender to make it easier to get poetry books into the hands of the people who would want to read them.

I can say from experience and from talking to many people that even when people know they want to read poetry, they will not buy any until they know what's out there. The bookshops don't stock enough of it to make a representative choice available. The libraries both ditto and are (come to think of it, like the bookshops) closing. The fact that Eliot and Spender felt the need to found a PBS should be enough to indicate that it was ever thus - and, fortunately, perhaps, in the days after the War the arts were seen to represent somehing vital about the culture for which we had been fighting and were deemed worthy of backing at a national level. The PBS is also a legacy of that generosity and idealism.

Any vehicle that enables sales must surely, in our grim capitalistic, X-Factor times, be considered a good thing. And the cost of doing that need not be high. The PBS has a hardworking staff of four staff, not all full-time, and operates on a shoestring. They're not a swish operation. Sure there are things that could be rationalised, ironed out and updated - the model is 50 years old, for one thing, and consumer habits have changed - and yes, they could certainly do with broadening both their reach and their poetry church - but the booklet they produce, the information they make available, and the TS Eliot prize for poetry and the locus it provides, are all very good and useful things.

N.b., in the spirit of a disclaimer, I can admit here out of three publications none of my poetry collections has been a Selection or even a recommendation in the PBS listing. So you can't accuse me of vested interest.

Poetry publishing is in a looking-glass world where there seem to be more authors than readers (other sectors may be discovering that world for themselves these days). The PBS is by no means perfect but has well-established mechanisms that are a good place to start for developing readership through recommendation, and through availability (especially the recently created website for buying books well beyond the range of the recommendations). The mechanisms in some ways are too well-established and need some improvement, but the Arts Council has the right kind of leverage (if it was still funding the PBS) to encourage that. A poet bringing out a book in the same quarter as Heaney is not going to be the Choice, for instance, so a different set of categories for the books, and a wider range of selectors changed more frequently would also help. It does help that they now include pamphlets in a rather minor way, but they could make more of that.

The quarterly (not monthly) cycle has a long lead-in, and pubishers would be getting books ready now to be submitted for the season in April-June 2012 that looks like the first quarter with no PBS to submit to. Anyone in the book trade will know the importance of being able to get the scheduling right, and at a single stroke the Arts Council has made things annoyingly difficult for the whole range of poetry publishers, many of them not funded at all. The problems of overproduction of poetry titles (yes, I'm saying that and I'm a poet) could be structurally affected by changing the rules, for instance that a collection coming out within a certain number of years of the poet's last one would not be eligible. The Arts Council isn't beyond that kind of fine-tuned engineering of the fields they work in, but instead of that, they've simply cut the whole thing.