Category: Marketing

seeing blessings in pain, in good times and bad

I’ve been going through a pretty rough period, lately. Wild mood swings, extremes of emotion; fear and anxiety, doubt and depression, passion and drive, optimism and six shades of pessimism leading to the verge of self-defeating behavior. I’ve been stressing out about little things, big things, things well beyond my ability to control. I’ve even gotten into a couple of pointless arguments with people (on the internet, not in person) along the way. I reached, and passed, a mental point of no longer being able to stand staring at my old artwork, and I’ve already sold about a third of it off at prices lower than I’ve had to go in about a decade. I’ve finished the first drafts of two books, and I’ve already managed to spend more hours working toward marketing the books than the raw hours spent writing those drafts.

It’s all been quite mixed and complicated. Quite a bit of good, and a lot of misery and stress and depression, and quite a lot accomplished. I’ve been going through all this (and more, and worse, and better) for months, and in the last few days I’ve realized explicitly that I wouldn’t want it any other way.

The intensity of emotion I’ve had over as relatively simple a matter as trying to get in touch with a couple of photographers or otherwise navigate the legal complications of using someone else’s photography on my books’ covers is indicative of how much I care about what I’m doing. How much I care about the work I’m doing. How passionate I am about my creations. I care so much it hurts. I care so much I’m willing to hurt myself in the process of getting it done right. Even at the worst of the worst of these sometimes quite bad times, I’ve never really doubted that I’m living the life I’m supposed to be. Sometimes I doubt my skills, my talents, and frequently I doubt the quality of my output, but I don’t doubt what I’m doing; if I’m ever to reach the level of skill and quality required, it’s only by continuing the work. By living through the struggles, and coming out stronger on the other side.

I don’t get bored of my work, not really. Even when I’m doing desperately repetitive things, things which a year ago would have made me sick to consider for even a few minutes, there’s no boredom. This week I’ve read about a thousand (no, literally, a thousand – every title across ten Amazon top 100 lists) book descriptions/blurbs, to try to learn by immersion the structure and style of effective book descriptions, especially in the categories Never Let the Right One Go will be listed in. The very thought of such a study (with no mention of its scope) would have made me physically nauseous a year or two ago. (Writing my own book descriptions has always been a painful and difficult struggle, usually with corresponding ill feelings.) The premise of going through a thousand books has bored several people in my vicinity who only heard of the project, didn’t attempt it. Having set myself to the task, and believing fully in the value of it to the success of my current project, I found the whole exercise quite stimulating, and only mildly nauseating.

…The point is, my life -even my depression- is a joy. I have a wife who loves me, and who I love, and we enjoy each other’s company and bring happiness to one another. We have our basic needs met, and we’re making significant progress toward being debt-free, which will give us a lot more freedom than the significant freedoms we already enjoy. I’m free to follow the creative spirit God gave me, to build with my mind and my hands and my heart the things which flow from that boundless wellspring. Importantly, I’m not forced to make myself a slave for the sake of money: Even though I’m hoping and working toward making Never Let the Right One Go my most commercially successful books to date, I’m not doing any of this in pursuit of money. I expect to exceed a thousand hours of work put into creating this duology before I’m done with the First Edition in paper, electronic, and audio formats, and every hour has paid for itself already by being an hour spent creating something I care about. Creating something I hope other people will find as worthwhile as I do.

For as long as I’m able to go on following my heart and my dreams, my imagination and my inspiration, all these apparent “rough times” will be not only worth it, but part of what makes life worth living.

Secret art for sale

I’ve already sold several pieces, and am in negotiation to sell a few more, in my ‘Blank Canvas’ Art Sale – though I still have another 30+ pieces I’d like to find new homes for, ASAP. In addition to those you can see at wretchedcreature.com, I wanted to post about a few others that aren’t listed there. Why aren’t they listed? Different reasons, which I’ll try to detail below:

This piece, titled ‘screwed’, is approximately 32×47″, and is acrylic (spray paint) and screws on/in plywood. I worked on this piece over the course of multiple years, carefully mapping out and then drilling thousands of tiny, careful holes in the wood, selecting lies GWB had publicly told the American people (and which I felt we all knew, by then, were blatant lies) and spray-painting them on in as twisted version of the American flag as GWB must stand by, then screwing, by hand, about 1600 tiny screws into the thing (without scratching the paint job, of course). Why is there no image of it on wretchedcreature.com? Well, I’m disappointed in it. The flag didn’t come out as well as I’d hoped, GWB’s face isn’t as clear as I’d hoped, and I didn’t finish it until 2006. I’d meant to have it done prior to GWB’s re-election, and when that failed (and my life changed), I set it aside for a long time. If you’re interested though, please, make me an offer.

This piece was one of the oldest I still have, circa 1998. The technique, the quality, even the theme and tone of the piece contribute to why it isn’t currently listed at wretchedcreature.com. It doesn’t fit in with the other work I have there. I think what I was trying to do was paint a black rainbow in the sun’s rays. As though, no matter how bright the things of this world may seem, none shines as bright, none is as pure, as the light and sacrifice of Jesus. I just don’t feel it was adequately communicated. My records indicate that this piece is titled ‘gothic inversion’ and that it is 18×24″, acrylic on canvas. If you’re interested, you can make an offer, but right now it’s hiding in the closet. It was taken down in the last round of “I don’t really want to see my old work, anymore”, years ago.

The piece at the right, incongruously titled ‘Spiraling Shape 4’ despite being the first painting I worked on after moving away from home in 1997 and the first of the “Spiraling Shape” series, is not listed at wretchedcreature.com primarily because I didn’t feel it conveyed anything emotional. When I was first putting the site together, it was important to me to stick to the stated theme, ’emotional artwork from a troubled mind’, which fit better with, well, most everything else I paint. This piece is 20×16″, acrylic and yarn on canvas, and if you want it, take it – every time I walk by this one, I half-wonder why I didn’t hide it in the closet with ‘gothic inversion’. On the other hand, as you can see in a semi-recent post I made about it, it does help me see how far I’ve come.

There’s this thing. It’s called ‘reign’, it’s 16×20″ and acrylic on canvas, and it was also painted in 1998. You can probably see what I was going for, though the bad photograph really brings out all its weaknesses. (In normal lighting, it’s somewhat less painful to look at. The brush strokes are less obvious, for a start.) There’s a fair amount of math at play in this piece. The color scheme is even based loosely on a derivation of the digits of pi. I remember when I liked it. I think I’d like it better if I did it now, with another 13 years’ experience at play. If you think you’d like it, make me an offer.

I have several more from the same period, all these rainbows. ‘Rainbow Connection 2’, ‘Rainbow Connection 3’, and ‘Spiraling Shape 6’:
The first one, ‘Rainbow Connection 2’ is actually glow-in-the-dark; an alternating pattern of rainbow stripes curved in the opposite direction from the visible stripes actually glows, either in black light or after being in a brightly lit room. This never worked as well as I would have liked, though it did work. It was a complex and fascinating attempt to achieve something I’m not sure I’d dare, now. Some of the things about it I could achieve with more skill, others would probably take a fair amount of experimentation and frustration with the materials before I was satisfied. As it was, I just made the one attempt, and left it at that. It was my practice run, and effectively discouraged further experimentation.

The second one, ‘Rainbow Connection 3’, which I thought of (before painting it) as an object passing through a rainbow and bending it along the way or leaving a wake, inspired a lot of lewd comparisons over the years. The frustrations I had with this one also informed a lot of my work in the time since, and I feel I have significantly improved my ability to mix and blend colors smoothly since painting ‘Rainbow Connection 3’. The third one, also numbered after-the-fact, is ‘Spiraling Shape 6’ and is probably the third or fourth thing I tried to paint after moving out on my own. It is roughly based on the golden mean, both in color and in shape, though I feel my later work interpreting the same thing came to a better result. All three are 16×20″, acrylic on canvas, except ‘Spiraling Shape 6’ which also has yarn. These three I had to dig around a bit for, to be sure I actually still had them. I keep them out of sight.

I also keep ‘Untitled Triptych 2’ out of sight. This was done while I was experimenting with reverse painting, and with painting onto glass, then carefully transferring just the paint from the glass to a painted canvas, and integrating the reverse-painted image with the canvas-painted image. I’d show you what this eventually led to, one of my greatest works (a portrait of Tyler Durden), but it was the first painting I ever sold, which was then gifted to someone, which was then stolen/lost by their evil ex-. I didn’t start seriously photographing my art until a year or two after that sale, and didn’t try to track it down for a photo before it was lost. Anyway, this thing is a 16×20″, acrylic on canvas image created as an experiment about translucency in the work that led to that project. (Alright, alright, there might be a painting or two that utilized the technique later, which I do have photos of. Tyler was better.)

The above image is ‘Untitled Triptyh’, three 16×20″ canvases, painted with acrylic, showing some of my earliest work with color blending, and using pure color to tell a story. The color reproduction in this image (as in all the images in this post) is not particularly good. I took the photo with the best camera I had in 2003 or 2004. I had a better camera for a time, but currently my best camera is in my iPhone. sigh. Anyway, I’ve had a lot of interest in this over the years, but only ever for one or two thirds of it; most people don’t seem to like the leftmost canvas. bleh.

And the last of my older artwork, I have one more small piece I created while I was working toward the one I started the post with. This piece is titled ‘screw Moo’, it’s approximately 17×14″, and is acrylic (spray paint) and screws on/in screws and wood. I adapted my painting ‘Moo’ to test out my ideas for creating a design from screws in a piece of plywood. This one was only hundreds of drilled holes and hundreds of screws, although it has the added bonus of the step of spray-painting half the screws before screwing them in, then trying not to scratch the paint on the screws while screwing them into a piece of wood. It was much more successful than the bigger piece, I think. The lighting in this photo is terrible; the background is just solid, spray-painted black. As with all the others, if you think this piece would look great in your home, make me an offer. I’d love to have it find its way to a new home.

Now on to the unseen of the newer work. The image at left, shot with my iPhone, is the best I have of this piece, which is … uhh… well, it’s sculptural, really. It’s about 8x11x6″, acrylic and yarn on canvas, and it’s titled ‘too far, not far enough’. I was learning to crochet, making little crocheted sculptures, and I began thinking about how to combine the sculptural work I was doing in yarn with the two-dimensional work I was doing on canvas. So I crocheted this right into the canvas (after painting the 2D part in colors I chose to match the yarn, ahead of time) and the blobby bits actually extend right off the image into the room. I really like this one. Unlike most of the stuff in this post, which I was tired of looking at a long time ago, this one I still like, and the reason it isn’t on wretchedcreature.com is that I have no idea how to present it there. A straight-on photo (like every other piece on the site) doesn’t show you what it is. What I’d like to do is take a bunch of photos and make an interactive image a viewer could mouse around and see it from multiple angles. Part of the reason I never followed through and made more pieces like this was the difficulty (near-impossiblitiy) of displaying them properly on my website.

Here’s another one I’ve never yet figured out a sufficient way to photograph. This is a 40×30″ monster of a painting, acrylic and ink on canvas, and it’s somewhat darker than it appears in the image at right. Dark enough that the words all down the left-hand edge, in sharpie, are almost unnoticeable. They disappear into the darkness. This piece is titled ‘this is how I…’, and the word repeated over and over down the side is “feel”. The darkness, the colors, the contrast, the shiny reflection of light which sharpie ink does and the paint does not, it’s all important to the piece, and I haven’t encountered a camera and lighting setup, since painting it, which captures the image accurately. And it was too big to take with me to the Art Walks, without causing trouble. So it’s almost never been seen. If you’re in the Phoenix area and would like to come by and see it some time, you’re welcome to. If you want to just buy it without getting a good look at it, that’s welcome, too. It’s a very emotional piece. Here was another attempt to get a good shot of it:

Not sure either shot does it any justice. I feel almost as bad about photos of the following painting, though I’m also pretty sure there were failures in the painting process as well:

You might not be able to tell by looking at that image, but it says “sleep” … in a way. The ‘s’ of sleep is just the shape of a wave in the darker block of the image, and it’s only there in glossy medium on a matte background – visible to the naked eye, but difficult to photograph. the l is the border between light and dark, and like the remaining letters, is further differentiated by a line of glitter/iridescent medium. The remaining waves, capped with looping lowercase e’s, are also painted on in a layer of glossy medium on a matte paint background, and the p marks the end of the glossy area. There were a lot of mixed-media ideas wrapped up in this 24×48″ piece titled ‘water, bed’, even though really it’s just acrylic on canvas. This piece is, right now, the most likely candidate among all the pieces I’ve shown you in this post to be painted over first. A lot of the details came out great; I especially appreciate the edge of the canvas, which is painted a darker blue where the face is lighter, and a lighter blue where the face is darker. Others were not as I’d hoped. Not being able to show it is, perhaps, the worst. If you have any interest in this piece at all, let me know soon – I already have an idea for painting over it. (I also have a couple other blank canvases in this size, but … ugh. I stare at this thing every day, knowing no one else has seen it. Knowing it’ll probably never find another home. I’m sure that’s why my mind goes right to painting over it.)

So, in addition to the pieces you can find at wretchedcreature.com, these are a few others I’ve still got around and wouldn’t mind being parted with. No reasonable offer refused, and on those old 16×20″ pieces, $20 seems pretty reasonable, right now.

‘Blank Canvas’ Art Sale

I’ve only painted 5 new works in the last two years. Three were commissioned and two were for the covers of my own books. I want to get back to painting, to creating new art, and I want to try new things. All the art I’ve made in the last 15 years which I haven’t sold or given away is hanging on my own walls, staring back at me day and night, showing me what I’ve already done. Showing me where I’ve already been. I look around me, and I can’t seem to get a grip on the future, when all I see is the past.

I’ve taken this time away from my art, given myself some mental space, and looking back on my work now I see it with new eyes. I can see what’s good about it, but I also want to start with a clean slate. I want to move forward. I’ve decided to try to get most of the art I still have on my walls into the homes of collectors and fans, and return my own walls to the blank state that calls out for new creation.

Until the majority of my work has found loving homes, I’m taking any reasonable offer. I’ve updated the prices on each image’s page at wretchedcreature.com to reflect what I think a fair range of prices would be, but if you still can’t afford a piece you love, consider ‘telling me why you love it’ part of your first payment – tell me why you love it and make an offer you can afford, and I’ll probably give it to you.

In fact, if you’re reading this and have the mental overhead to consider such a thing, I’ll give you everything at Buy One, Get One half-off. What that means in a “no reasonable offer refused” sale is up to your imagination.

Also: I’m going to use any proceeds from this sale toward the publication of my upcoming duology, Never Let the Right One Go, since it won’t have any original cover artwork to sell for fundraising. If you buy art between now and its publication, I’ll send you free copies of the eBooks. If you buy two or more pieces, I’ll send you a free copy of the signed limited edition paper version if/when it gets published.

So: Buy art for yourself, buy art to give to your friends, add a little color to your life. Take advantage of this ‘Blank Canvas Sale’, help me create amazing new images in the future, and help me fund my new books.

Thinking about fundraising for NLtROG

(This post began as a post on G+, then got longer, then I brought it over here… and began adding even more to it. Also: NLtROG is a fairly terrible abbreviation.)

Already thinking about fundraising for Never Let the Right One Go. Have to figure out how to do a Kickstarter more than a handful of people will respond to, or an alternative means of raising funds. Also ought to contact those photographers & see if/what they want for high-res, commercial-use, et cetera, since it could have a huge impact on my fundraising goal. sigh.

(Note: I just sent messages to each photographer, via flickr. We’ll see what they say.)

If the photographers are awesome & generous, or at least not evil, the minimum I’d need to raise for a 50-copy limited edition paperback is around $400. Or around $800 to do it as a hardback.

Pretending I could ever sell all 50 copies, and adding the cost of shipping &c, I could price a signed, numbered, limited edition paperback flipbook (containing both texts) at $20-$25, on Kickstarter. For the signed, numbered, limited edition hardback I’d have to ask $40+, but … Hmm… How about a limited edition of either 50 or however many people pledge at that level (“to allow for more,” he said optimistically), whichever is greater, and at a quality level to be determined by the number of backers, based a little on:

The floor price for direct paperback sales (under my current pricing scheme) would probably be $10.99, and around $15.99 for the hardback, based on some top-of-the-head calculations. (And of course $2.99/eBook, though I’ll be offering them individually only.)

So, if the pledge point to get the paper book was $20 or $25, then if we only hit the minimum goal (say, $400, if the photographers are awesome), the print edition will be paperback, and if we pass a sufficient threshold (really just 35-40 backers, by my estimates), then everyone gets hardbacks instead. And if I’m wildly successful (thousands of backers, or tens of thousands) then I could afford to do offset printing of an even higher-quality book. And then die, trying to sign them all. Maybe I should limit it to, say, 500 copies?

Ah, wild, unbridled optimism. Who put that in my pessimism? I’m supposed to be all, like, “In my past Kickstarters, I’ve been successful only by the sale of one or two super-premium items, not by the accumulation of many paper book pre-sales. This time, I have no ‘original cover art’ to sell, and may in fact have to pay a significant sum for the covers I have in mind. This will never work!” Oh, well. Maybe I can find 16-40 people actually interested in paying $25 for my new books? Seriously, though. $25 for 2 books! What a great deal! I mean, if you buy new books, at all. It includes shipping? sigh.

first thoughts on marketing my new duology

I still seem to have trouble writing books which are easy (for me) to describe. “What are your new books about?” If I could have expressed what I wanted to express in a few words, or a few hundred words, I probably wouldn’t have written 130k+ words to express it. I think writing a book which is easy to describe must be something a writer or author must set out to do before beginning; know before creating the book what the easy description is, then make sure you write a book which fits it. Alas, that is not how I write books.

I did manage to do a lot of things with my latest books to make them more commercially viable than a lot of my other books, though pre-blurbing them was not one. For example, when structuring the story, I made sure that the “kindle preview” (or first couple podcast episodes) was more of a “hook” than I normally do. In one of the books, I took an exciting sequence from the end of the story and moved it to the beginning, so the book starts (almost misleadingly) with tension, drama, and action, instead of just exposition. In both books, I crafted the first sentence, the first paragraph, and the first 2 chapters specifically as “hooks”. I’ve also been working on creating industry-standard book covers for the books, which tell you very little about what the book is, while looking like a lot of the other book covers out there, and maybe make you want to click through and get to those first paragraphs/chapters. (I’ll show you the covers in a moment.)

The blurb/descriptions, though, are my next big challenge, along with coming up with commercially viable main titles for each book. (I have a series title / subtitle for both books: Never Let the Right One Go, which I had before I even knew it would be two books. That title is almost the inspiration for the whole project, actually.) The titles need to be short and declarative or active, preferably one or two words, and memorable. The blurbs can be up to about 100 words, but as I keep saying, I’m not much good at that part. And the title is 50-100 times harder. I’m not sure what I’ll do.

Anyway, the following are the quick-and-dirty first-draft covers I put on the first-draft eBooks I sent out to my First Readers this weekend. Keep in mind, I’m just using the name of each book’s protagonist as the titles for this version, “Sophia” and “Emily”, so the books can be told apart in my First Readers’ descriptions/responses. Also, I’m not 100% satisfied with the font. But this is the sort of generic/commercial covers I’ve come up with, so far:

 

The image of “Emily” is adapted from a photograph by Danila Panfilov, and the image of “Sophia” is adapted from a photograph by Jesse Millan. I think they’re great photos, and represent the characters well enough, and while the versions I used here were available under a CC BY license, so I can (theoretically) use them commercially as long as I credit the photographers, I’m thinking I need to contact the photographers, and may have to pay considerable sums of money (which I don’t have, and the books probably won’t earn) to get high-resolution copies of the originals for a print edition, to get broader license to actually distribute the modified images (the covers) as covers (I can credit them inside the book, but what about every online bookseller the cover appears on? Do I need to add their photo credit to the blurb to satisfy the CC license?), or to get model releases for using these two young ladies’ likenesses on my books. My business model of selling the original artwork I create for a book’s cover in order to cover the costs of creating the print edition doesn’t work when, instead of painting the cover, I have to buy photographs; it reverses it, turning the cover from a source of income to an expense. Not sure how to reconcile that, yet.

So that’s where I’m at. The books are written, and now I’m into getting them ready for marketing/distribution. As I get feedback from my First Readers (let me know if you’d like to be a Beta Reader!), I’ll modify the text, but in the meantime I’m trying to figure out these frustrating, commercial, details.