It depends on what you mean by “making it”. I mean, I haven’t had a day job in 5 years; I make my living as a pianist/keyboardist for the theatre. I live in New York City, have done several tours, an Off-Broadway show, several Off-Off Broadway shows, and any number of cabarets and regional productions. Having said that, it’s not like I’m living like a king. I make enough to have a small apartment and go out when I want to, but it’s not caviar and champagne all the time either.
I’ve worked really hard to get to this point, and I feel that Broadway is right around the corner for me. Basically, making a living in the arts boils down to this:
Be good.
Be persistent.
Profit!
Which, near as I can tell, is just like any other industry. The only difference is, we get a bad rap because people assume since we don’t work in an office eight hours a day, it’s not a “real” job. Joke’s on them; I’m doing what I want to be doing and I’m getting paid for it. Not a bad way to live life.
So to answer your question, yes it’s hard, but I can’t imagine it would be any harder than going through eight years of med school or something like that. And if music or painting or whatever comes naturally to you, then it will just be that much easier. Yes, there’s a lot of competition out there, but, again, it doesn’t seem to me to be any more competitive than working on Wall Street or something like that.
I think there’s a sort of Catch-22 here, though. How much effort should one put into a pursuit that is unlikely to pay the bills?
I make beaded jewelry as a hobby, and have been doing this for about 15 years. I’ve put a lot of time into it, and have produced IMHO some very nice pieces. Yet while people often tell me I should sell my work, they aren’t exactly lining up to pay enough for me to make even minimum wage on the labor that goes into each piece. I mostly make things for myself or as gifts. I’ve sold some pieces to family and friends who wanted to give them as gifts to other people, but that’s about it. I’ve had some stuff in a friend’s booth at local craft fairs, and have sold exactly one piece this way. I consider this my only “professional” sale, since it was to someone who didn’t know me personally.
I could sell more of my work if I put a lot more time and energy into marketing it, but there are only so many hours in the day and even if I really hustled I’m unlikely to ever see any significant profits. That’s why I prefer to think of my jewelry-making efforts as a hobby and not a career. It’s true that I’ll never “make it” as a jewelry designer if I don’t put more effort into getting my stuff noticed, but it’s also unlikely that I would ever make as much money doing that as I do in my current profession. The only person I know who supports herself entirely with jewelry-related work (including repairs and teaching classes at the community college) lives in her van and has no health insurance.
It took me about 15 years to finally gnaw through the golden handcuffs at my last corporate job and finally strike out on my own as a freelance CG artist (Married, two kids). During those years I worked the usually 9-5 (sometimes way later), then would moonlight clients at home, until I could build up enough clientele to finally take the plunge. I still work a lot of hours… but I’m freeeeeee! (sorta)
It was a lot of hard work, for a very long time (still is). I think, some people just want a paycheck. So do I, but for me, there’s far more to it than that.
Really, which is it? Do successful artists “not in the slightest” need to market, or are all of them “sharks when it comes to handling the business end of their careers”?
I think you need to stick to one position, if you want to make it convincing.
Tyhe notion that the average run of authors do “not in the slightest” need to market themselves is, quite frankly, astonishingly incorrect. Certainly publishing success can strike, but this is not the normal or expected authorial route to success - which is, far more commonly, paved with lots and lots of extremely hard work at self-promotion; this holds just as true in the other arts, if not moreso.
Citing J.K. Rowling, or Stephen King, or John Grisham in this context is very misleading. The kind of deals they get and the marketing support they get from publishers are extremely unusual, nothing at all like what the typical “successful” author gets. Rowling can write the book and then sit back in one of her mansions while the publisher does all the marketing, but that’s not how it works for the author who is successful enough to make a living but not one of the top-selling authors of all time.
That’s a common mistake that first-time authors make: Thinking that the publisher will do all the marketing. They will do some, but authors find out quickly that they don’t do much. Budgets for marketing are extremely small these days, and after a short time the marketers move on to the next project. Then the author realizes his book didn’t sell well and complains that the publisher didn’t market it enough.
There’s a advice column I look at and one of the recent questions is what to do about a recent college grad (music performance degree) who is back home with the folks, depressed, student loans and other bills, and no job. I find it sad reading. (The symphony in my city just folded and I imagine things aren’t better elsewhere.) To find a job in that field now must be really, really hard. (or any field, actually. Anyone want to get my own kid an entry level job in the field of anthropology?) To make a living in the arts must be doubly hard, and I think it’s who you know and where you live, as always.
Now she can. Back when Harry Potter came out, do you really think the publisher marketed it any differently than any other book by a first-time author with a similar advance? Same for Stephen King – he got a $3000 advance on Carrie. Do you think the publisher spend millions marketing that book, or just did whatever they did for a book by any other first-time author? No.
Once they established themselves as big names, then, yes, there was much more money put into the marketing. But King and Rowling and every other successful novelist became successful because of the quality of their work and the promotion the publisher put into it.
If marketing were the key, then you should be able to make a best-seller out of a book of gibberish. You can market until you turn blue in the face, but if the product isn’t anything people are willing to pay money for, then
No, but they will do 100% of all the effective marketing. They will get the books into bookstores, send copies to reviewers, and take out ads. An author can promote his book, and it doesn’t hurt, but it accounts for a minuscule percentage of sales and takes time away from writing.
If it was all promotion, the best seller lists would be filled with vanity press books. Are they?
The publishers are doing less than in the past (maybe – they’ve invested money in a book, so why wouldn’t they try to sell enough copies to make up their investment?), but it’s far more than what any individual author can do. Can an individual author get his book in bookstores 1000 miles away from where he ever visited? No. Author promotion is only effective – such as it is – with people the author has met face-to-face. You can shamelessly attempt to sell a book to every person you meet, and that would be a fraction of the effectiveness of the most desultory promotional campaign by a publisher.
You may be unaware of this, but the “business end” and “marketing” aren’t the same thing (and what is being discussed here isn’t marketing; it’s promotion). For an author, marketing means finding people willing to pay you for your work. Business means contracts, payments, copyright protection, rights sales, etc. Authors quickly learn the business end if they’re going to survive full time. But I know of no full-time authors who spend any serious amount of time promoting their work, and they didn’t get the be full-time writers by wasting time with promotion.
There’s also the fact that paying for art is a whimsical indulgence of mainly First World citizens with money to burn, whereas those other professional disciplines are necessary for society to operate.
John Scalzi, Cory Doctorow, Scott Sigler and the rest of the bloggy author generation are all tireless promoters. And it’s what helped them make the leap from “bloggers who also write fiction” to “authors who also blog.”
Well I do. My former professor of Criminal procedure, Alafair Burke, just released her lateast book, Long Gone to excellent reviews. She is on book tour (publisher instigated of course) but not a day goes by she isn’t relationship marketing with her fans - organizing a giveaway on Facebook, emailing her lists of upcoming appearances, publishing short commentaries to her blogs, and all kind of other activities that create a fanbase.
By the way, she doesn’t write full time. She teaches full time, and writes on the side. I don’t think anyone could accuse her of not being savvy to the publishing industry, though. Not only is Long Gone her 10th commercially published novel, her father, James Lee Burke was also a “name above the title” author.
That’s just one individual I can point to right now. I used to work in the Marketing Department for a major bookseller. The publisher has a few (very few) titles they are hyping all the time. The rest of the list, the overwhelming majority, is quite ignored by the publisher. To get their book out into the public view, the authors do most of the work. it really is little different from self-publishing in that regard. For example, when you see notices or reviews of books being published by alumni in your alumni magazine? There is zero chance that listing was publisher intigated.
I remember this ad vividly. “BE A QUANTUM MECHANIC even if you never finished high school. Study at home!” And look how few quantum mechanics there are!
Chuck and I are both published authors and members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. We have boards of our own and everyone talks to everyone else. Promotion is about the number one topic.
Yes, those three made it from tireless blogging. Can you name a dozen? Can you name a hundred? Many writers now have blogs, podcasts, websites, Facebook pages and all the rest of the apparatus. After the fact. The number of people who made it big by blogging is the same, in fact probably less than, the number of people whose first novel became bestsellers in the olden days. Their success just makes it harder for everybody else because it is presumed that writers will need to spend way too much of their time at blogging instead of writing. Chuck may have overstated by saying no one, but most writers would far rather spend their time writing than promoting.
Just about everything that needs to be said about the new world of writing can be found in the amazing story of Amanda Hocking. In January a USA Today article announced that this unknown self-published e-book writer had sold a half-million copies of her books. In a month. Yet by March, the New York Times reported that she was selling her next series to a traditional print publisher. Why?
I’m not going to cry about running a buggy whip factory. I’ll either find a way to adapt or die. Writers today just need to know that the world has changed. Many fantastic writers of the past could not possibly promote themselves in this fashion. Some, Hemingway or Fitzgerald, e.g., would do fine. Going forward the world will be stripped of people who just want to write. It’s just the way it is.
There is also the fact that businessmen tend to devalue jobs in the arts because “anybody can do it” and "everybody loves to do it.’ Some actually believe it – next time you see a particularly badly done bit of advertising art, it’s probably because some businessman or woman hired thier nephew who “really likes art” and has done some watercolors to do the job, because they buy into it the notion that anyone can do it – others just use that as a way of bargaining artists down to nothing or as close to it as they could get. And some artists will work for free. That has all kinds of good effects on the bargaining of artists who don’t want to.
And just look at all the job ads for online writers from places like “The Enquirer” which promise nothing but “exposure” as payment. IMHO, you are being exposed as a fool if you work on those terms. If you don’t want to be paid, post it to a damn message board! Or on your own blog! On your own blog at least you MIGHT get ad revenues!
The dedication issue is important as a common ethos as much as a necessity for quality work. Maybe more so.
Music imposes an unusually high penalty - in terms of credibility and perception - for not devoting yourself totally. Enough players buy in that it raises issues if you don’t. The result is a kind of pernicious professionalism. Plodders and executants who are full-time are rewarded more than part-timers who might have something valuable to say musically.
The same goes for any product - you can’t sell a vaccum cleaner that does not actually clean, but that does not mean that marketing is essentially worthless for vaccum cleaner sales.
