What is wrong with this picture?

Peekay said:

<snip> I eventually tire of this circus and decide to hang my paintings before the public upon the metal railings that surround the park.

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You forgot to mention that the park is located far away from where the painting-buying public goes, and that the park is filled with other works from other artists -- some good, most ghastly -- and the aura from those other works begins to permeate your canvases, adding a greyish hue which clouds the vibrancy of the colors, and blurring the clean edges of your brush-strokes.

Peekay said:

I am a painter. I have a number of canvas' ready to show to galleries all of which I consider to be my finest work. I have slides taken of them and want to send these to the relevant exhibition spaces. Obviously I can't just send the images to galleries as no gallery will look at paintings that do not come from a paintings agent. As painting agents will not look at work from a painter that does not have a gallery this poses a dilemma. I decide to purchase the invaluable services of a pre-painter, a professional that knows what the galleries like. She takes my paintings and paints out offending portions, recolours others and informs me that the public taste is decidedly against violet or indeed any mixing of red and blue, she then suggesting complete removal of this offensive spectra. I dutifully obey upon which as if by magic my paintings become magically attractive to agents and thereafter, galleries. She reccomends that the paintings be marketed towards the 'young adult collector', a class of art lover recently much swollen in numbers. This entails the removal of any overly long brush strokes, a mark against which the young adult collectors are much opposed. They are dutifully expunged.
Within the gallery the owner introduces me to the repainters, a team of pros kept by them to correct the dreadful omissions of the artists whose inability to practise their own craft is legendary. These persons apply further revisions and corrections to the canvases to ready them for the gaze of the public whom they must protect from any works that might place undue strain upon them. It is decided that the paintings do not 'grab' the veiwer with sufficient violence upon first glance and so brighter more explosive hues are added to lure in the eye of the 'art collectors' (These are described to me as bovine creatures who wish all paintings to more or less resemble each other and who start at anything that remotely differs from expectation.)
To my surprise the gallery expect me to whitewash their walls for them, print and send out fliers advertising the show and drive the collectors to the gallery in a bus but, earnestly willing to join the pros I concede to these demands.
I eventually tire of this circus and decide to hang my paintings before the public upon the metal railings that surround the park. When ensconced here I am continually surrounded by other painters who castigate me as an onanist and egomaniac, insisting that I once more don the gallery owners yoke as a sign of sweet humility. They even mock me and strut around before my railings thrusting out their chests and crying up the manly virtues of 'the marketplace' the gladatorial arena in which they battle. They shout that none that be not as hardy, thick skinned, career minded and masochistic as they be allowed to show in galleries at all!
Crazy?
No gallery owners or artists would ever act in such a draconian or subservient manner?
It happens every day, only you have to be a writer.

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In other words, you don't know how to create a painting anyone likes, or is willing to pay for.

Yes, and if you're looking down the writer's road, here's what you're going to see.

In the short term, it will soon become the "norm" that every mss is professionally edited BEFORE being submitted to an agent. Who foots the bill? The writer. This makes the mss almost, but not quite, a turnkey text block. It's all so sleight of hand--the agents suggest this, a whisper becomes a rumor, and then it becomes the "norm." The publishers did this with marketing and now the author marketing is accepted as the norm. Saves the publishers a lot of money.

In the long term, the major publishers via their courtesans, the agents, are going to wait until the desperate author self-publishes. If the author is relatively successful with sales--proving there's a market for their work--one or more of the agents will swoop down on the unsuspecting prey and offer to represent a sure thing, the publishers signs them on, and voila, a star is born. But who foots this bill? Who takes all the risk financially? Who does all the work? You guessed it--the writer. Up to the point a contract is tendered and signed what has the agent and publisher invested? A little surfing time. And what's really neat about all this, from the agents and publishers point of view, is that they now have a turn-key product where the publisher will glean a lion's share of the royalties, the agent skims his or her take from the writer's portion, which if he or she signs the contract, drops significantly. And the writer still has to do all the marketing. It's happening more and more and more these days. Pretty soon, this will be the main road, not some little side trail or outside chance.

If you've read Animal Farm by Orwell, authors are the horse being worked to death by the pigs, who aren't worried in the least because there's so many horses out there dying for a spot in the stable.

I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

Mari

novelator said:

Yes, and if you're looking down the writer's road, here's what you're going to see.

In the short term, it will soon become the "norm" that every mss is professionally edited BEFORE being submitted to an agent. Who foots the bill? The writer. This makes the mss almost, but not quite, a turnkey text block. It's all so sleight of hand--the agents suggest this, a whisper becomes a rumor, and then it becomes the "norm." The publishers did this with marketing and now the author marketing is accepted as the norm. Saves the publishers a lot of money.

In the long term, the major publishers via their courtesans, the agents, are going to wait until the desperate author self-publishes. If the author is relatively successful with sales--proving there's a market for their work--one or more of the agents will swoop down on the unsuspecting prey and offer to represent a sure thing, the publishers signs them on, and voila, a star is born. But who foots this bill? Who takes all the risk financially? Who does all the work? You guessed it--the writer. Up to the point a contract is tendered and signed what has the agent and publisher invested? A little surfing time. And what's really neat about all this, from the agents and publishers point of view, is that they now have a turn-key product where the publisher will glean a lion's share of the royalties, the agent skims his or her take from the writer's portion, which if he or she signs the contract, drops significantly. And the writer still has to do all the marketing. It's happening more and more and more these days. Pretty soon, this will be the main road, not some little side trail or outside chance.

If you've read Animal Farm by Orwell, authors are the horse being worked to death by the pigs, who aren't worried in the least because there's so many horses out there dying for a spot in the stable.

I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

Mari

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You are wrong. It's nonsense. I hear this kind of silliness often, and it always seems to come from someone on the outside looking in. It simply bears no resemblance to reality.

Publishing doesn't work this way, and doesn't want to work this way. The last thing publishing wants to do is work this way.

You always know someone is off base the moment they mention marketing. Writers do not do all the marketing for their work. Many wirters do no marketing at all. Publishers do market the work of new writers. Every time, with every book. What, do you think pubishers want to lose money on an investment? Though it is the writer's book, and why would he complain too much about helping in the marketing process?

And the writer doing all the work? It's simply nonsense. It's fool talk. Neither publishers nor agents are sitting around waiting for writers to self-publish. By and large, agents and publishers try to stay as far away from self-publilshed writers as possible. Why? Because almost everything out there that's self-published is complete garbage. A waste of paper, and a waste of everyone's time.

Most of those who come from self-publishing to commercial publishers never gave commercial publishers a chance in the first place. And there aren't many who come this way at all. For good reason. Crap doesn't smell any better because you self-publish it.

And calling agents courtesans really means you're standing outside in the cold looking in. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I wonder if most even know what history is? You know, things that happened in the past. There has never been a time in history when more first time writers were published. Not even remotely close. There has never been a time in history when it was so easy for the average person to write a novel and find a good agent and a good publisher. There has never been a time in history when publishers spent anywhere near as much money promoting and distributing first novels by unknown writers.

The way wannabe writers whine now, I really wonder how they would behave fifty or seventy-five or a hundred years ago when it was fifty times harder to break into pubishing? I wonder how they would act if they woke up one morning and found there were only 375 publishers in the entire publishing indutry, most were tiny, and almost none of them wanted new writers on anything like a regular basis? And when they did take on a new writer, he'd better have some serious credentials.

I wonder how they would react to knowing that distrivbution was lousy, that there were only a few ways to sell a novel, that the publisher had all the power, and agents who could go to bat for a writer were few and far between?

Everyone who fails wants to blame publishers, agents, the system, or the phase of the moon. The myths and nonsense built up around failure is impressive. If this much imagination went into a novel, it would probably be a bestseller.

In truth, the fault is almost always with the writer. Most people can't write at all well, and that's a fact. For every person who can tell a good story, fill it with good characters, and make it something people want to read, there are a hundred who couldn't write a grocery list without help. This is true in any area where talent and skill matter, and it's silly to think it shouldn't be the case for writing.

Hemingway said the most important thing any writer can possess is a "Built-in, shock proof sh*t detector." Most new writers do not have this, but good agents and good editors have the latest model already installed. And it goes off each time they get within thirty yards of the slush pile.

The writer has more going for him today than at any time in history. It's far, far easier for a new writer to get and agent and sell a novel to a commercial publisher than it ever has been. Agents and editors are always doing their best to find new, talented writers. It's not their fault that so few are around.

And therein, perhaps, lies the root of the problem.

Peekay said:

...all of which I consider to be my finest work...

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I see somebody's taken their bitter pill this morning.

Shadow_Ferret said:

I see somebody's taken their bitter pill this morning.

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Yes, those bitter pills can be difficult to swallow. Try a spoonful of sugar.

novelator said:

The publishers did this with marketing and now the author marketing is accepted as the norm. Saves the publishers a lot of money.

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Perhaps it's the norm at places you wouldn't want to be published by anyway. Real publishers want to sell books (otherwise they go bankrupt). They don't leave the marketing to untrained, unskilled, underfunded amateurs.

You, the author, quite literally do not have access to the genuinely useful avenues of promotion and marketing.

Peekay said:

When ensconced here I am continually surrounded by other painters who castigate me as an onanist and egomaniac, insisting that I once more don the gallery owners yoke as a sign of sweet humility. They even mock me and strut around before my railings thrusting out their chests and crying up the manly virtues of 'the marketplace' the gladatorial arena in which they battle. They shout that none that be not as hardy, thick skinned, career minded and masochistic as they be allowed to show in galleries at all!
Crazy?
No gallery owners or artists would ever act in such a draconian or subservient manner?

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Honey, if you don't think artists actually do that, you're livin' in a dream world.

Artists are generally lovely, wonderful, deeply kind individuals, while simultaneously being vengeful backbiting sardonic scum. (This has little to do with being an artist and everything to do with being a human, mind you.) If your art is unapproachable and unmarketable, believe me, the number of artists who will flutter their eyelashes and speak in honeyed tones about the importance of self-expression is nothin' compared to the number of artists who will snicker behind their hands at your pretentious butt.

Trust me. We're just as vile as writers. Galleries are just as draconian, just as specialized, and just as hard to get into. There's just fewer of us, because the obvious skill threshold for art is a lot higher--it's immediately apparent if you can't draw* whereas if you can write a sentence, you can aspire to being a writer.

Also, your "repainters" really exist. They add paint strokes to canvas prints to make them more collectible. It's part of marketing for people like Thomas Kinkade.

I get that you're miffed about self-publishing or something, for some reason, but at the moment, what's wrong with this picture is your choice of metaphor.



*Not that this stops everybody...

Peekay said:

Crazy?

No gallery owners or artists would ever act in such a draconian or subservient manner?

It happens every day, only you have to be a writer.

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Hang in there, sounds like you hit a wall. Take your time, get up and try getting through once again. Your not alone!!!!!

JamesARitchie - I don't *always* agree with you, but I always look forward to reading your posts. You take the time to give a very complete view of your opinions. Even though your posts can sometimes be abrasive to the thin-skinned, they always have the cleaning power of Comet and scrub right down to main idea. I need a moisturizer after most of your posts, but I still say "Thank you."

There is a world of difference between the art of creating fiction and the crafts of writing and getting your work published. A good writer is going to embrace both art and craft if they want to create excellent fiction that is publishable and if they want to work within the publishing industry to market their work.

Kate Thornton said:

Even though your posts can sometimes be abrasive to the thin-skinned, they always have the cleaning power of Comet and scrub right down to main idea.

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I love this metaphor!!!! Whhhoooo hooo!

Speaking of repainters--I used to be a "repainter." My previous artistic hobby involved buying dolls, taking all the factory paint off them, and repainting them (see my work at www.Shalimardolls.com). It is very similar to writing. The new artists can't understand why their work doesn't sell for over $1000 a doll--or even sell at all. It takes a certain amount of talent, a discriminating "eye" in addition to sharp acuity of vision (some folks even use magnifying glasses), and practice, practice, practice!!! Of course, with painting, the right brushes and paints are the trade secret that makes all the difference.

An established name always did better than a nobody, good pictures were essential (if you couldn't get good, clear high-resolution pics collectors would be stupid to buy), and clever posing and accessories helped, but in the end, it was THE PRODUCT that mattered. If your work looked like a two-year old's attempt, it was laughed at. Some of these things were down-right scary (including many of mine). But if you scrutinized the best artists' work you could learn enough to do pretty well--with patience, perseverence, and practice.

By comparision, writers have it easy: no paints, brushes, sealants, pastels, etc.; no camera equipment, lights, photoshopping; no web-site to design, no e-bay auctions write (they aren't as easy as they look--the good ones anyway), no hassles with dead-beat buyers who don't pay up or foreign buyers who want you to lie on the customs forms, and then sometimes you have the paint just perfect and when you heat-set the doll's hair, the boiling water would cloud your sealant or smear your paint. AAaargh!

Writing is so much simpler--and cheaper.

Of course I know many of you hate to think of writing as a hobby, but until it's making a living for you, that's what it is.

Hobby, perhaps - no real quarrels with that, but it becomes a full-time and sole adequate income-earner for very few, and then usually only after years of hard work.

But simpler? By simpler, if you mean easier - Who are you kidding?

And cheaper? Everything's relative to income.

Neeli said:

Writing is so much simpler--and cheaper.

Of course I know many of you hate to think of writing as a hobby, but until it's making a living for you, that's what it is.

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If you don't like the rules of the game, stop playing. If you want guidance or help on a specific road block, ask a question.

James is right though, there were more novels published now than ever before, and quite a number of them are first timers.

The task lies with you to craft a sellable story. If you can, chances are extremely high it will be picked up.

After you've been at it for a while, rejection becomes standard, and once you get past the self implications which rejection actually lacks but some take it that way, then you can see it as an opportunity to try again, write the next book and the next one, fine tune your writing. Make it irresistable. Try looking at your own work with a critical eye. You won't make it to the publishing phase without it. Also, the editors in the publishing companies, really are needed, and they do good work. I suspect very few books were better off before the editor touched them. And if your agent took it on then told you to get it professionally edited, especially if they sent you to a source, you fell in with a wolf. A scam artist.

Sorry, but you've been scammed, which is where I think your bitterness is coming from, sad but true, and if your publisher told you to do all the marketing, also a scam. Could you possibly be a Publish America author???

I was force fed all of the misinformation you are spewing, I simply chose to spit it out and rinse.

Of course I am guessing as you are rather vague in your post, but it sounds like you are speaking from experience.

Take a deep breath, look around the forums, and get the real information of how it really works. You might just find it isn't as bad as you think.

As the dawn rose at the end of WWII, there were fewer than fifty bookstores in all of America.

Today there are over 8,000.

People are buying more books, reading more books, and reading later in life, than ever before.

And let me tell ya, it isn't the presence of PODs that's making that difference.

The reason, I think, that so many people are so absolutely convinced that reading is a dying pastime, no one reads books anymore, no one sells them, we're as illiterate as the collapsing Roman Empire...is because unlike movies, music and television, you don't have ten billion little magazines telling you all the juciest gossip about the book business, you don't have ten million web-sites with movies and music sections, you don't get the gossip about the authors that you get about celebrities.

As such, we assume the field is dead, which is hardly the truth.

What really worries me is that, to an extent, agents and publishers (the sort that would steal the pennies off your eyes) can whisper quietly that writer's pay for editing and publishing and do their own marketing...and the nature of the internet, to an extent, is that this can be spread and eventually accepted as a "norm" by kids who don't know better. It's very worrying.

Look. Part of playing this game is being willing to work for your books success. THat doesn't mean paying for better marketing, paying for an "upgrade package" to get your book in hardcover, paying some schmuck with a turnstile printer to make you up some bookmarks. It means doing interviews when your publisher sets them up, being willing to do book signings, and mostly....WRITING ANOTHER BOOK.

How often have you heard Terry Pratchett, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling point out that they're sure glad they've been so successful, or they would have had a hard time making back all the money they'd spent to get published?

Never. You hear them talking about writing their next books, writing their last books. That's the point.

I adore the current publishing process, and the fact that it can sometimes take a....long...time. Honestly, I haven't the head if it were a fast-paced business. I like that by the time my current novel probably hits stores, I can easily have my next novel written.

I think that it should be required reading for every writer (particularly young/new ones) to read How To Lie With Statistics. Watch the so-called POD industry (which is on-par with the "stealing tires off people's cars" industry) reshape before your very eyes.

James and James are exactly correct, and what it boils down to is this: They may both be arts, but writing and visual arts are not precisely analogous, either in the way they work or in the way an audience responds to them. Music is yet another animal. We see this analogy made, in some way, every now and then, and it simply is false.

And that's from someone else terminally on the outside looking in.

caw.

I don't buy the party line on this, not for a second. Of course people already in the business will lash out to anyone who criticizes it as "on the outside" and without a clue. And of course they're going to defend the system that's working for them. There's nothing wrong with that, but that doesn't automatically mean they're being objective about it.

It's all the same. Visual art, music, and writing. They all suffer from the same disease.

When it comes down to it, you can't use art as a means to create capital and expect it to stay as art.

To make more money, the culture industry has to lower the bar, so their products appeal to more people (which is now synonomous with "good").

So the public can't understand atonalism? Just make a note not to sign any artists who make atonal works, nevermind what they're trying to say or how well they say it. If it's atonal, it can't sell so- it's bad.

And now, for whatever reason, the public has no attention span. So now the culture industry adjusts its standards, changing what is "good". Rather than chastising the people for letting their minds slip, and showing them some books they might enjoy if they just get off their *** and think for a minute, the culture industry says "books that do not satisfy these people are bad."

Painting, music, and writing are full of so many stupid rules now, and the only reason those rules exist is because they help a book appeal to the lowest common denominator. There's no room for experimentation, no room for serious expression. We've become addicted to kitsch.

Art isn't supposed to be "easy to read" or necessarily pleasing to the eye. Yet now this is all anyone knows. Escapism and kitsch should be secondary, not the entire industry. I find it utterly insane that so many writers, painters, and musicians are so eager to adopt a standardized method.

Then again, I'm probably totally wrong. Boring pop music fads, books that read like screenplays, and soulless paintings are popular because they're "better". I guess my unwillingness to adopt standardization is a sign that I am a bad writer and musician. Too bad, really.

That's why I don't talk about writing; I talk about commercial writing.

The painting=novel metaphor doesn't work for me from the get-go. A painting is a single physical thing. You can sell it once and it will hang on one wall and be seen by some limited number of people.
A published novel exists in thousands of physical pieces, can be owned by thousands of people and read by both first and second-hand-owners plus anyone who borrows it.
I think you should have started with print-making, though prints aren't a perfect equivalent either, because they're usually numbered and limited, and books only rarely are.
Basically when I try to follow this allegory, I get tangled up in wondering whether we're talking about the classy leather-bound painting, the cheaper painting-club edition, the mass-market or the trade softbound painting ... Nope.
I stumbled at the first on a whole bunch of paintings all being the finest work - I paint sometimes, and I can tell you which of my pieces are better in which ways and what I learned painting them. If all your work is at the same level, it sounds as if you're not advancing anymore, however fine it looks. Of course, this is the metaphorical 'you', not the real you. I'm sure that you yourself continue to learn and advance, despite setbacks and visits to Bunyan's Slough of Despond.
It's tough. Selling your painting is tough too - which is why I stick to doing it for myself.
-Barbara

Bufty said:

But simpler? By simpler, if you mean easier - Who are you kidding?

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Easy, no. Simpler, yes: no brushes to wash, no paint on your hands, no pictures to take, no garage full of packing peanuts and boxes...

To write, you only your computer, or even just a pen and paper. You can do anywhere--in a car, on a camping trip, at the beach. Just playing around in your own mind.

It's all the same. Visual art, music, and writing. They all suffer from the same disease.

When it comes down to it, you can't use art as a means to create capital and expect it to stay as art.

To make more money, the culture industry has to lower the bar, so their products appeal to more people (which is now synonomous with "good").

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This is a disease that stems from the artists, not the industries. Some art is very successful commercially, yet remains art. The problem is, other artists see this happen and they begin to immitate the successful art, leaving out what really made it art in the first place.

ET was a quality film. Come on, you know you loved it. It was ART. And it was a smash hit. But if you look at all the "Mac and Me" imitations that followed it, you'll notice the reason ET was popular wasn't because it was about a friendship between a cute alien and a young boy. That formula continues to fail. ET was about divorce. About being abandoned. About human issues.

Industries only make the inferior immitations available because there's a demand to be filled, and few pieces of superior art to fill it. The artists aren't producing enough good work.

I'm on the outside looking in, but I like what I see. I like my chances. I don't WANT the industry to make it easier for me to get in. I can get in on my own. All I have to do is produce the kind of writing that I would personally love to read, and I guarantee there will be others who love to read it too. This is indeed a great time to be an unknown writer, and there's no reason for any of us to be less optimistic than that.

RG570 said:

I guess my unwillingness to adopt standardization is a sign that I am a bad writer and musician. Too bad, really.

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And I guess if you're going to create something that is so narrow in scope that only a handful of people might be interested then it should come as no surprise when you can't find a market for it. Nor should the industry be berated because they try to purchase only what they can sell.

But, to be honest, I've never considered myself an "artist," merely a hack writer who writes what he enjoys to read. I make no pretentions about art or intellectualism.

RG570 said:

Then again, I'm probably totally wrong. Boring pop music fads, books that read like screenplays, and soulless paintings are popular because they're "better". I guess my unwillingness to adopt standardization is a sign that I am a bad writer and musician. Too bad, really.

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Awesome. Seriously. You do realize your entire post boils down to, "if you don't like what I like, you're a soulless sheep"?

I had a lot more to say, but Neeli and josephwise and Shadow Ferret covered it. I'm sorry life isn't turning out the way you expected it would.

Neeli said:

Easy, no. Simpler, yes: no brushes to wash, no paint on your hands, no pictures to take, no garage full of packing peanuts and boxes...

To write, you only your computer, or even just a pen and paper. You can do anywhere--in a car, on a camping trip, at the beach. Just playing around in your own mind.

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And, most importantly, no self-combusting paint rags to burn the whole house down.