Marketability = Evil??

By RomanticRose · Jan 19, 2010 · ·
  1. Why is being concerned with the marketability of a piece seen as a terrible thing?

    Writing is a form of communication. Communication requires a sender and a receiver. Without concern for the reader/receiver, one might as well be writing in a private journal.

    I can understand therapeutic writing. I do my share of it, but I don't feel entitled to have it published, just because I needed to write it. It is separate from the writing that I publish and want to publish.

    Not every writer has the goal of traditional publication, I realize that. I have no objection to anyone saying, "These are my standards, I will write according to them." What I am irked by is when anyone says, "These are my standards and you are a horrible person if you don't write by them."

    Your mileage, as usual, may vary.
    RR

Comments

  1. NaCl
    I'm going to use a modern swear word. Are you ready? Here it is...p r o f i t. There, I spelled the dastardly beast while watching over my shoulder for writer-lightning bolts to strike me down. Such blasphemy. I should be ashamed.

    Truth is, money is not the root of all evil. Evil is the root of all evil. Writers who aspire to make money in exchange for their hard work...wait a minute...I thought people are supposed to get paid for hard work. Now, I'm confused. I slave away for eight hours a day in a job I hate--do it for the money--but I'm not supposed to expect profit from my writing? I need an aspirin. LOL
  2. Rei
    It's not evil, but it's certain attitudes regarding money that I don't like. NaCl is right, we do deserve to be paid for our hard work. That's just the way the world works, and that's fine. But it' when the money becomes more important than the art that bothers me. When it doesn't matter what it is as long as people will pay for it.

    And I don't know you, do I don't know what you value, but the way you talk about the business end of it, that's what it sounds like.

    But consider this. George Lucas, Jim Henson, Tolkien, Gene Roddenberry, Rowling. All people who do/did things their own way, stayed true to who they were. Before Star Trek made it on TV, the network people hated it. They could hated that he had a woman with such a high rank and, god forbid, a black woman who wasn't a maid. Look at how Star trek, Star Wars, and Tolkien have influenced our culture. Look at the Muppets. Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal are cult classics.

    There is nothing wrong with profit. We need money to survive in this world. Its greed that we don't like. And not staying true to who you are. Yes, sometimes people see it when it isn't there. I'm not accusing you of anything, just telling you where the other side is coming from, and how they interpret what you are saying.
  3. HorusEye
    Profit isn't a bad thing in itself. It's only a problem once profit overshadows and compromises art. Once you gravitate towards the popular, politically correct beliefs that aren't your own, in order to appease those who hold the purse. Once you censor your own ideals and dreams in order to pay lip-service to the latest fads. For profit.

    It's not widely different from when multinational companies promote themselves on their new environment-friendly standards, just because "green" is the new black. Coca Cola don't give hoots for drinking water in the 3rd world -- they just wanna make profit. Raising the banner of global awareness in order to look like one of the good guys and thus make more money is one of the greatest hypocrisies in our time.

    You can choose to do the same with what you write. It's up to you. Personally I find it hollow, cynical and in the end totally pointless. I think art deserves better than that. But to each their own.
  4. RomanticRose
    Okiedokes, I've already admitted I'm greedy, selfish and, essentially, a horrible person who should have been drowned the day I was born.

    Agree to disagree, shall we?
  5. Cogito
    What defines marketability? Whether or not enough people will read it to make it worth trying to sell it.

    Whether or not they admit it, people write with the hope that someone else will want to read it. Possible exception, a personal journal or diary, but even then, I suspect that many hope it will someday be discovered and enjoyed.

    So why do people cringe if you bring up marketability? Because it is associated with the judgment of a proifessional editor, and that's scary. They expect to be rejected in that arena, so they pretend it is not a goal they seek.
  6. RomanticRose
    Cognito,
    Thanks. That makes a lot of sense.
    It's more the judgemental attitude that gets to me. I'm pretty thick skinned, but people acting as if wanting a piece to be marketable is tantamount to turning tricks or rolling little old ladies for their pension checks gets irksome after a bit.
  7. HorusEye
    That's a bit of a stiff generalization, Cog...

    I'm not scared of editors. Actually, I'm pretty convinced they're gonna bend over backwards to be allowed to buy my graphic novel once it's done. Yeah, I know how that sounds, but it's my sincere conviction. What I'm scared of is censoring myself because of what I think people want. Then I'd might as well not write at all, because it would be so similar to everything else out there -- and why bring sand to Sahara? I have a vision for how I want my story to be and if I compromised that vision I'd no longer have an incentive to write it. Now, on the other hand, if you don't have any particularly significant things to say, then you might as well parrot what everyone else have said already, and earn some bucks doing that. But I'd rather write a story that has a profound impact on a small audience than write a story that has little to no impact on a huge audience...
  8. We Are Cartographers
    I'm with HorusEye on this. The question that you need to ask yourself as a writer is whether you are maintaining your own vision for the piece. It's one thing to take the suggestions of an editor/publisher in order to make the piece more marketable and quite another to write very safe work because you want to appeal to the widest possible market.

    Or to put it another way: do you want to sell your art, or do you want to make art that people will buy? Two very different things.
  9. RomanticRose
    Maintaining the vision of a piece is what I do in the general fiction (in final round of agent reccomended edits, before shopping it around). This will be the first novel I publish under my own name. In that work, I will only tolerate a certain level of changes. If someone told me to change my main character in Dancing Shadows (working title) into a vampire or wizard or change my not-so-happy ending into a happy one I would be more than happy to let it sit in a drawer, rather than let it be published that way.

    On the other hand, unless I want to get what the rest of the world calls a real job, I must make writing pay for itself. So, I write fiction targeted to very specific demographics that want very specific things. Is it my "art"? No, not really. But the people who take money out of their pocket and put it into mine are happy with the transaction. I'm happy with the transaction, because I make money with a talent/skill I worked hard to gain and hone. Just for a bonus, it's still writing. Practice makes perfect. Creating a beginning, middle and end, with characters, plot, setting, lush descriptions, intense emotions, and a happy ending all in 60-65K words isn't quite as easy as it might sound.
    My general fiction is better written because of the bodice rippers and the fetish erotica.

    The photographer, who wants to be the next Ansel Adams, but must --economically, speaking -- take wedding pictures, family portraits, glamour shots or pictures of cute little kittens for posters, is he wicked and evil, too? Or is he using one form of his art to allow him to pursue the goal he really wants.

    I will have an edge when Dancing Shadows is shopped around. I already have an agent and a track record of finishing things on a regular basis and a history of people paying for my fiction.

    The readers get what they want and I get financial and professional gain. I call that a win-win situation. Your estimation of it is your concern. I stand on mine.
  10. We Are Cartographers
    I guess where I come from on this is that an artist tries to do both. But again, this is a difference of perspective. You make your living by writing. I don't. And I don't have any interest in doing so at the moment. Maybe one day.

    The point being that from my particular perspective on the artform, if you're going to sell your work you should also make it artistically interesting. I believe that the career writer should have to go through the uncertainty of melding art and market.

    Samuel Johnson, who has a whole literary period named after him, was a self-proclaimed profit writer. He wrote to make a living. But his writing maintains its merit today because he did interesting things in his market. Mark Z. Danielewski is another favourite example of mine. Go read the Wikipedia page on House of Leaves and understand that that was his first novel. That was how he entered the literary market.

    So like I said, these are different ways of looking at writing. You probably think that my opinions on writing are naive and snobby, and I probably think that yours are cheap and lazy. Both of us are right, in our own way and all of this probably hints at something we could each stand to learn from the other.

    Either way it's a fun debate.
  11. RomanticRose
    Actually I don't think your opinions of writing are naive and snobby. You're doing what is right for you as you see it. That's all I'm doing. To be perfectly honest, I actually give very little thought to how other writers, published or otherwise, think about writing. I either like someone's writing or I don't. Interestingly enough, I don't really get that worried about how other writers think of my approach.
    I just get tired of being judged by those who aren't in possession of all the facts. I'm still working on whether "cheap and lazy" is better or worse than "selfish and greedy."

    I would love to have the luxury of writing only what I want to write, the way I want to write, when I want to write it. Cross your fingers for my numbers in the powerball drawing. I don't see writing something that is not to my tastes as a reader is somehow more demeaning than waiting tables or running a cash register or flipping burgers or anything else someone might do to earn their keep. THAT is what I'm trying to figure out.

    Any way you slice it, though, Art (with or without the capital 'A') is still an intensely subjective term. Some venerate Monet, others worship Picasso, still others wax poetic over Pollack. And yet another group thinks Elvis or a matador on black velvet is the highest of the arts. Every point in the spectrum of any art will have its admirers.

    I've read House of Leaves and enjoyed it. I found it well-written. There will always be those who jump in and land on the crest of the wave, but those are the exceptions.

    There were factors in my life that made me want to get into reasonably profitable writing as quickly as possible. I'm not talking about a mansion on a private island with hot and cold running maids profitable. I'm talking about a one bedroom apartment and an ancient used car that ran on faith and 2 quarts of discount motor oil a day profitable.

    Are the articles I write treasonable, as well. Because that piece I did on equine massage therapy was less than enthralling to write, but I did get a lot of positive reader feedback and paid my electric bill, to boot. Is it writing for money that's bad or just writing fiction for money?

    I'm rambling now, but since this is my blog I suppose I'm allowed.
  12. We Are Cartographers
    Heh. Equine massage therapy eh? If you could make that into an art piece I think you'd be pretty much set as a writer.

    Journalism and non-ficiton writing have largely become a different beast in the modern age. There was a time (can you tell that I study older literature?) when they weren't so separate. To use Johnson again, if you read his essays from The Rambler, The Idler or The Adventurer, there's no doubt that he was attempting to explore ideas in an artful manner. They were essays, but also pieces of art. You don't see that as much anymore and the trend towards extreme specialization in knowledge makes it difficult to do. Equine massage being a case in point.

    I just wish that we had a literary culture that encouraged the art before the market. Or at least in conjunction with the market. We're at a point in the development of western capitalism where we understand that almost everything has a market if you know how to sell it. You see less of the reactionary denial of marketability-as-commodification that you saw in early-to-mid twentieth century art-countercultures and I think that's a good thing. Art and markets can work with one another. The danger comes when you choose one entirely without the other.
  13. RomanticRose
    And I don't even have special knowledge in equine massage. When we moved down here, I found one of my neighbors does it for a living. I spent a few hours a day with her and with some of her clients for a weekor two, wrote the article and sent it out on spec to a 'horsey' magazine.

    Writing some things for a market, doesn't make me less of a writer. I'm just as passionate about Dancing Shadows as anyone is about their work. Writing things for a market just lets me work on Dancing Shadows without the stresses of a real job. Granted, writing has it's stresses, but if I didn't love those stresses, I'd be doing something else.

    Perhaps things were better 'back in the day', but spending a great deal of time pondering that is another luxury I don't have. Although to my modern-day mind, the appalling plumbing would be a great disadvantage. I like running water and electricity.
  14. Rei
    Wow. I never said any of that. I made a point of saying that I don't know you, or what you value. I just said that this is how some people might interpret how you talk about the business.
  15. RomanticRose
    Did I say you did say it? Must have been typing in my sleep again. I'm terribly untrustworthy when I'm in REM sleep. I misquote people often at that time.
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