Rupi Kaur Self-Published Milk and Honey
Quick answer: How Rupi Kaur self-published Milk and Honey in 2014 and turned Instagram poems into a global bestseller: the real story, dates and lessons for poets.
In November 2014, a twenty-one year old student at the University of Waterloo uploaded a manuscript to a print-on-demand service because nobody in publishing had asked for it. She had absorbed the advice young poets always absorb, that poetry does not sell, that there is no market, that the sensible move is to wait. No agent was circling. No editor had pencilled a date. So Rupi Kaur designed the cover herself, drew the illustrations herself, arranged the pages herself, and pressed publish on Milk and Honey with the same hands that had written it.
What happened afterwards has been analysed, imitated and argued over ever since: the book went on to sell millions of copies worldwide and sat on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year. But the sales figure is the least useful part of the story for a working writer. The useful part is how much of the machine Kaur built herself, quietly and over years, before the world noticed there was a machine at all.
Before the Book: Open Mics and a Second Language
Kaur was born in Punjab, India, in 1992, and emigrated to Canada with her Sikh family as a small child, growing up in Brampton, Ontario. English arrived as her second language, and she has spoken often about the silence of those early school years, the experience of having thoughts with no ready words to carry them. Drawing came first: her mother handed her a paintbrush before she had the vocabulary to explain what she wanted to make. That pairing of image and text never left her work.
As a teenager and university student she performed spoken word around Toronto's open mic circuit, reading to rooms that owed her nothing. She posted poems to Tumblr, then moved to Instagram, pairing short pieces with her own line drawings. This is the part the fairy-tale version skips: by the time anything went viral, she had already spent years writing constantly, performing regularly and publishing daily to whoever happened to scroll past. The audience she eventually reached was not conjured. It was accumulated.
Publishing It Herself
Milk and Honey appeared in November 2014 through a self-publishing platform. Kaur, who studied rhetoric and professional writing, treated the book as a designed object rather than a stapled stack of poems: four movements, the hurting, the loving, the breaking and the healing, threaded with her drawings, set in her now-famous lowercase.
By her own account, the traditional route looked closed to the kind of book she wanted to make, so she stopped waiting for permission. It is worth pausing on how unfashionable that decision was in 2014. Self-publishing poetry was widely treated as an admission of failure. She bet that her readers, many of them young women who already followed her online, did not care who the publisher was. They cared whether the poems said what they had been unable to say themselves.
The Photograph Instagram Deleted Twice
In March 2015, Kaur posted an image from a photo series about menstruation, made for a university course. Instagram removed it. She reposted it; the platform removed it again. Her written response, arguing that the image was deleted while the same platform hosted endless objectifying content, was shared at enormous scale and reported by news outlets around the world.
Honesty requires calling this what it was: luck, of a strange kind. An act of censorship became the loudest advertisement her work would ever receive, and her following surged. But luck of this sort only converts into a career if there is something behind the click. Readers who arrived out of curiosity found a finished, self-contained book waiting for them. The viral moment did not create Milk and Honey. It revealed it.
Andrews McMeel and the Numbers
In 2015 the publisher Andrews McMeel picked up Milk and Honey and reissued it. The book then did what poetry books are not supposed to do. It spent well over a year on the New York Times bestseller list, was translated into dozens of languages, and was widely reported to have passed three million copies sold within a few years, with the press gleefully noting at one point that it was outselling Homer's Odyssey.
The Sun and Her Flowers followed in 2017 and Home Body in 2020, both bestsellers, alongside sold-out international tours where she performed to theatres rather than open-mic back rooms. Whatever critics made of the poems, and many made very little of them, the audience was real, global and largely made of people who had never bought a poetry book before.
Why the Lowercase Matters
Kaur writes entirely in lowercase and punctuates almost only with the full stop. She has explained this as a tribute to Gurmukhi, the script of her mother tongue, which has no distinction between capital and small letters and, in her telling, makes do with a single punctuation mark. Within the script she grew up alongside, all letters are treated the same, and she wanted her English to carry that visual equality.
Her style also sits at the centre of the long argument about so-called Instagram poetry: is radical plainness a democratic opening of the art, or a flattening of it? A working poet does not have to pick a side to learn from the case. Kaur made deliberate formal choices, could articulate the reasoning behind each one, and accepted the cost of readers who would sneer. That is a craft position, whatever you think of the poems it produced.
What a Working Poet Can Take From This
The tempting lesson is the wrong one. You cannot plan a censorship scandal, and copying the surface of Kaur's style has already been tried by thousands with predictable results. The transferable lessons sit lower down: she treated the poem, the page, the drawing and the route to readers as one object she was responsible for; she showed up in public with work for years before anything happened; and when the moment of luck landed, it landed on preparation.
There is also a quieter lesson about audience. Kaur wrote for readers the poetry establishment had not imagined, in language they did not need a degree to enter, about grief, abuse, migration and healing. Knowing exactly who your poem is for is not a marketing trick, it is a craft decision. Underneath the whole fairy tale is one unglamorous habit: she kept putting finished work where readers could respond to it, which is the same rhythm a monthly contest like Writory's is built on, entries open the 1st to the 25th, results on the 30th, every poem read and scored rather than met with silence.
What poets can take from this
- Build the audience before you need it: post, perform or submit something finished every month, even when nobody seems to be watching.
- Treat your poem as a designed object; typeface, spacing and accompanying image are choices, not accidents.
- Write down the reason for every stylistic habit you have; if you cannot explain the lowercase, the fragment or the missing title, reconsider it.
- Know precisely who your reader is and what they cannot yet say for themselves; write toward that gap.
- When luck arrives, it multiplies whatever already exists, so keep a finished body of work ready at all times.
- Ignore the prestige hierarchy of publishing routes; readers remember poems, not imprints.
Try it yourself
Write a poem of no more than ten lines that a stranger could read in thirty seconds and immediately want to send to one specific person in their life. Strip every word that exists only to sound poetic.
Questions
Did Rupi Kaur really self-publish Milk and Honey?
Yes. She published it herself through a print-on-demand platform in November 2014, handling the writing, illustration and design alone. Andrews McMeel Publishing picked the book up and reissued it in 2015, after which it became a global bestseller.
How many copies has Milk and Honey sold?
Exact totals vary between reports, but the book was widely reported to have passed three million copies within a few years of publication, with translations into dozens of languages. It spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list.
Why does Rupi Kaur write in lowercase?
She has described it as a tribute to Gurmukhi, the script of the Punjabi language, which makes no distinction between capital and lowercase letters. She liked the visual equality of the letterforms and carried that principle into her English, punctuating almost entirely with the full stop.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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