Art vs Content

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There's a lot of competition out there in all art industries, but the problem is a lot of industries don't just attract real artists but content creators; and if you exist even a little in the digital world you will quickly realise that content creators are noisy.

Artists ... not so much. 

We like to focus on the work.

And it’s taken me until recently to find the courage to face my fears around pricing my work and make that distinguish within myself to help propel me forward.

Scarlett Marie is a true born creative, who has spent her whole life dabbling in the arts and craft, only to find her feet in the world of words whereby she has spent over fifteen years making stories come alive.

Her time and energy has been mainly spent on the series A Royal Life, of which she started drafting when she was fifteen. 

Here on the 'Diary of a Writer' she hopes to show people a peek behind the door of what it means to live as a full-time creative. 

Visit bookishfeat.com for more details. 

Transcript

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So, for the people who are actively listening to this podcast every five days when an episode drops, I just want to apologize for this one being a day or so late. I had a really bad case of laryngitis, and then life decided to throw a whole bunch of shitstorms at me, and this and this episode just didn't get done in time. Ironically, there are episodes after this date which have been recorded and uploaded, and they're ready to go. It was just this particular episode on this particular date that I didn't do because I was under the mindset that I would get back to it later. And technically I had got back to it later. I just didn't get back to it later within the time frame that I had hoped I would. So my apologies for those listeners who are actively listening and holding out for the episodes on a five-day basis. Anyhow, the subject for the day is art versus content. So when I was kind of off on my break from my podcast during the two months there, the other thing that I managed to get done was publish a children's book. I had written this children's book two years ago, and I had just been what have I, what was I doing with it? So I I'd written it, I I written it, I wrote it about in about six weeks. It was a really quick thing to do because it was only like 15,000 words. It was very easy, very streamlined. And I got people to look over it and edit it for me. And then I thought, well, you know, maybe we should try publishing this traditionally because why not? So I spent about 18 months doing that. And I and I focused mainly in Australia because it does have I mean it does acknowledge Australia quite a bit. And I thought it'd be kind of like a cute story to be on the Australian marketplace and also just help put Australia on the map for better things than shrimp and sports and alcohol. Oh, and meat. But anyhow, the the it didn't end up working out though. Um, so I do spend about 18 months actively looking for agents across Australia. Australia's agent pool is like absolutely non-existent. It's just so typical Australia and the arts. So I ended up just actually submitting to publishing houses directly because a lot of Australian publishing houses do allow that for Australian citizens because I guess they just know how freaking weak the agent market is. So I basically tackled almost every single publisher that was accepting children's manuscripts over that 18-month period. And I did look at agents within the UK, not so much in the US, but mainly in the UK. And it was interesting because I have queried before and I and it was during COVID or just before COVID, I think. Can't remember. Yes, actually, it was just before COVID. So the industry is very different these days. And it was interesting though, because I'm a bit older now than what I was when I queried um the first time around. And because I'm older, I have I don't know how to say this. I guess I've got what's the word? Not morals, not boundaries, which I do have, but it doesn't really work in this situation. Standards, there we go, there's a word. So I've kind of got standards, even when dealing with someone unknown, like an agent that could say yes and make all my dreams come true. I you kind of get to a point in life where you think you're just a bit more like you're not just gonna say yes to anything. In fact, you've learned that saying yes to anything is actually gonna put you in lots of detrimental situations which you don't want to be in. So when I was looking at agents in the UK, I was quite surprised that very few actually kind of ticked my boxes and made me think, yeah, I want to work with you, purely just on different things. So there wasn't actually a lot of agents in the UK that I queried to. Anyhow. Moving from all that, I decided that I was gonna publish it myself. And because I really had given it a fair crack to enter the industry and they clearly didn't want it. And then it was interesting because over the last, I want to say year, I actually did, I've actually been working on my illustration skills. So I've always really loved drawing and illustrating and just doodling, but I've never been like perfect at it. There's always just there was just a little bit of there was some sort of element that was just kind of missing. Anyway, so I did a um online course and it just really helped give me those skills that I wasn't otherwise aware of and seeing, and and it just really amplified my illustrations to a point where I'm like, okay, this is this is actually halfway decent. I'm still not the best illustrator in the world. I go online and I see so many people doing so much better illustrations than myself, but this, but I but I feel like at least mine is like decent enough. And this I've kind of got the feedback that it is decent enough. So I ended up spending time while I was careering this manuscript actually drawing illustrations for it on the premise that you know I I always had wanted illustrations with it. It's actually a middle grade fiction, no junior fiction, sorry. So it's junior fiction, so it's 15,000 words, junior fiction. So I was kind of in that space where there could be illustrations or no illustrations. It's kind of very early chapter books, like kind of like the first wave of chapter books a children, a child will get. So, but I had always envisioned that I wanted illustrations because I something I see in my children was that there is this huge jump between picture books and novels, and the chapter book market doesn't really exist for little kids. It's sort of like there is a really big jump. And the within the big jump, not only does the text get smaller, the illustrations also, the beautiful colourful illustrations disappear. You might get black and white illustrations, but not the kind of you know, detailed, beautiful, warm, fuzzy illustrations that you would generally associate with a picture book. And I really wanted to change that because you know, I think part of the reason why kids stop reading is that we make picture books all nice and warm and fuzzy, and then we take stories in a longer form and we just make them black and white text and really fucking boring to look at. It's like, well, no wonder why you're losing kids' interest because you're not keeping warm fuzziness. So I had this thing where I wanted to keep that warm fuzziness in this story, despite the fact that it was uh a chapter book. So, anyhow, so while I was querying, I drew some illustrations. I think there were 13 altogether, and it took me took me probably good eight, six months to do. And so I got to the point where I was just like, well, illustrations are ready, the manuscript's been ready for like ever now. Um, and I just decided to hit publish and do it on my own, under my own company, bookish fee. So though the interesting thing is when it came to putting this manuscript together, um, especially through Amazon for print, is the pricing. So Amazon have really increased their pricing for printed books over the last few years, just purely, I think, because there is a paper shortage in the world and probably because you know they just let money. And it was interesting with this manuscript because because of the pictures, it did make it more expensive to print, especially because I was opting for the high-quality paper and the high quality print. And it I always try and keep readers' budgets in mind. Like I'm I'm very well aware of most people's financial position, and you know that there is generally a certain collective belief of how much a book is worth. The the trouble is when you do it kind of when you're when you're publishing yourself is that you don't have control over being able to say print books in bulk and then you know save some overhead costs that way, which is how the publishers do it. Like they'll just get a huge run of books, and because they do such a huge run, they get a discount for doing it. With the problem with things like Amazon, it's print on demand. And because they have to have that technology to allow that, it just creates these overhead costs that just don't exist for you know publishing houses. So the the cost to publish your book through Amazon is just it's just a baseline, it's very high. And the problem is Amazon actually doesn't even allow you to price your books below printing costs. So you you generally have to have a baseline of how much you want to charge your books, even if you get like 0.01% royalties, is that you cannot lower your price beyond the printing cost of a book. And then, of course, you know, I I don't want to give myself 0% of the royalty of it because I've obviously put in time and effort to bring this, bring this story together. And then, but the problem is if I add any extra, if I want that royalty for myself, it then increases the price for the reader to purchase. So something that was already quite expensive to begin with, due to just due to the nature of it being print on demand, now becomes even more expensive because I'm adding a little bit more on top of it so I can get, you know, what am I getting for those books? I think I get about between four and seven dollars per copy that gets printed. It's not a huge amount. So it's not like I'm walking away with $10 or $20 for each sale that I make. It is, you know, somewhere between four and five dollars, or somewhere between four and seven dollars, I think. So, you know, I might be able to buy a coffee with that money. Anyhow, this this whole thing about pricing my books um really just got to me. And I had to kind of unravel it because I've always had this issue with you know pricing my work. I think a lot of artists do struggle with this and you know how to price their works affordably, but also to make sure they're not cutting themselves off too much. And you know, that there's a lot you have to think about when you are an artist. And when it came to this book, this pick this this children's book, I really have I really was forced to confront my beliefs and fears and all that when it comes to pricing my work. Anyway, so after so many years, and because now I've got actually, I think at least five different titles out at the moment, I decided to create, I decided to sit down and create a spreadsheet, actually. I decided that this this was worthy of a spreadsheet because I was getting very tired of trying to keep track of what I was charging and what I was getting for different books and different prices and whatnot. And I had also wanted to kind of move away from Amazon and kind of expand to other platforms like Google Books and using drafts to digital for getting to other retailers. And so I decided to create a spreadsheet to basically just show what I was pricing for each different book title, what the royalty was, and you know what the what the companies are taking away. So it's just very clear of what I'm pricing, what I'm getting back myself. And this was a really good exercise because it really allowed me just to see what income could potentially be coming in, how the different platforms take a certain percentage. It's really interesting how some take more and others take slightly less. So I do have on, especially on the digital front, I do have some platforms where the prices are higher than others just because of the company distribution taking more from the share than say others. So I think Google Books is actually the best from what I discovered. They they take less than what Amazon does. Amazon is second in place. And then if you go through drafts to digital, which is the easiest option to do if you want to do like Kobo, Apple Books, and a whole bunch of others, they actually take the most. So any books, any of my digital books on those platforms that go through drafts to digital will be more expensive than Amazon and Google. And I can't really do anything about that because if I want my, you know, tiny little four to six dollars, then I just have to increase the price so that I do get, you know, that cup, that cup of coffee worth of profits. So, anyhow, when I started working with this whole pricing thing, and what I basically came to realize is that there's a difference between art and content. And it took me quite a few days to actually figure out to this baseline of realization because I have I was aware of all the marketing spill and all the business spill that goes on about you know turning over a profit and being an independent anything. And a lot of the information is really about content, it's about putting yourself out there and creating content. But what I realized when I was like putting together this spreadsheet and really just trying to look internally at my own beliefs and fears is that I'm not creating content, I'm creating art. And historically, art has always cost a lot of money. Like if we go back through history and we look at like the big pieces of art, whether it's music or paintings or sculptures, they generally cost a lot of money. That's just what the quality of art required. And it's just somehow in this digital day and age, we've sort of reduced art to content level quality, and we've also expected art to drop to the price of content, even though the creation of art itself still takes the same amount of time and master level that would that we've previously seen in history. Like if we look at painting, painting hasn't become any easier than what it used to be. Admittedly, it is easier to get materials and it's probably cheaper to get some materials, but the process of creating a masterpiece, piece of art has not changed. We have not streamlined that process, and I don't think anyone can. Otherwise, the industries who thrive off artists would have, you know, made it known long ago. So I find it very interesting how we live in a day and age where it's actually mostly about content, it's not about quality art. And we see this across a lot of different art industries these days, where artists aren't really true artists and creating quality art, they're generally just creating content and trying to make sales and trying to make a big name for themselves. We can see this in music, we can see this in digital art online, we can see this in, and we can see this in books. There's a lot of people just trying to make money and make a name for themselves without any care for the quality of the art itself. So, and like whatever, everyone's got their own motivations and paths and desires in life. I don't begrudge those people, but it just makes it tricky when you come across people like myself and perhaps even you, where it's not about content and it's not about the dollar, and it's not about trying to shove something out quickly and getting people's attention. It is about actually sitting with the process of creation, taking your time with it. So when you go to hit publish and show it to the world, it's actually somewhat fucking decent. That that's quite hard to compare to the all the noisy content creators with you know putting out TikTok reels every two seconds or Instagram posts every you know five minutes. Like it is just generally hard as an artist to compete with that content machine. And so the one thing I really had to get my head around was that I wasn't a content creator, I was an artist. And because I was an artist, I had the right to charge more than say what content creators do. And working with that, working with that realization really just helped me look at my spreadsheet and be like, you know what? I am not gonna accept any less than this amount of royalty for this novel or this piece of work because I know the amount of time and effort I put into it, and I know that I deserve at least X amount of dollars in my account for that sale. It really just pushed me to a point where I was like, no, I'm not gonna try and price myself lower and minimize the take home I get just to try and compete with content creators. I'm not gonna do that. So basically, I've got to a point where I'm like, all right, I'm an artist, I've got quality pieces of work, and I'm gonna just charge what I can. That's still reasonable to the reader, but still gives me the takeaway of a cup of coffee in royalties. So I've got my spreadsheet now and I've got this mindset now that I'm an artist, not a content creator. And I tell you what, it really does help to have these definitions of myself or labels, if you'd like to say. I generally don't like to put labels on humans because I feel like we're just such complex beings and that we can't fully ever put any human being into a tidy little box with a label on it. But you know, they psychologically labels do, I think, help us transition away from this grey area of not knowing who the fuck we are to knowing who we are and then being able to propel us forward in the direction we need. And then hopefully, within that emotional, you know, going towards the path and following the path that we need, we kind of can let go of the label and not let it completely take over our personality because of a label, which is I think what a lot of people do with labels, unfortunately, is they kind of really become the label and re like revolve the whole personality around the fucking label as opposed to just being like, oh, that that's that's that's a label that I can apply to myself. I'm gonna use that and then get on with my life. It's just it's a choice, isn't it, when you just make your whole personality around a fucking label. Anyway, so the so I've got the label now of being an artist and putting out quality pieces of writing because I do take my time with them. Like my third fantasy novel for my series has taken me a good three years to get done. Probably will probably be just over three years to complete when it is finally finished. And even the shorter pieces, I generally put a lot of care and consideration into them. So, you know, there's that definition of being an artist, not a content creator, and that really helps. And it helps in lots of ways because I have always really struggled with marketing myself, which again I know is a really common thing around artists because marketing is just a totally different hat that you have to wear. And there's there's a huge, I guess, fear with among artists or being seen. It's sort of funny, like artists want to be able to live off their craft and their creative work, but they don't want to be seen. It's like it's like we all just expect to be able to live under invisibility cloaks, but then just like pick up stray cash or something from the ground. I don't know. It's a it's a pretty funny mindset that's common with artists. Anyway, I I don't generally have the issue with being seen anymore. I have had that issue, and in some ways I do still have that issue a little bit, but not as much as I previously have worked on that during a separate time of my life. But it we're coming back to marketing. I think the problem with marketing, especially in this day and age, is that it's very noisy. It's very based on the fact that you are trying to get under people's nose, you're trying to get their attention, you're trying to make as much noise as possible, which means you are probably posting regularly, right, running ads regularly, really just throwing a lot at it just to kind of make a blip on people's radar. And it is harder, I think, to do that as an artist because generally your focus is on creating the fucking art, not selling the art. And the other thing is I think when you create art instead of content, the art actually has more meaning to you. Like it's kind of like almost a part of yourself. Like I know in every piece of work I put out and publish, there is a part of me in it, or some sort of experience from my life in it. There's, you know, I don't know how you can be an artist and not put yourself in the art. And I think the hardest thing is about that is that if you then want to go and sell it out and market it, it's almost like you're trying to sell out and market a part of yourself, and that doesn't feel nice. Like you don't want, you wouldn't take, you know, your hand, chop it off, and then put a whole bunch of reels on the on the internet about it and try and sell it off. You you need your hand, your hand's very useful to use, and it's a part of you. So why would you do that? And your art is going to be the same. Yes, you express it out of yourself and you deliver it on the page or on a canvas, and it can eventually be seen by and read by other people, but the premise still is that it is still a part of you, and so I think coming to realize that and just really getting down to nitty-gritty of the reality of that and how it is just then harder for me to fit into this digital content circus that is our lives at the moment. It kind of just gave me the ability to say, well, you know what, I just don't fit on that. I just don't fit on that carousel within that circus. It's is not where I'm meant to be, it's not where my work is meant to be. And in doing that, it not only helped, like I said, me to be able to price my work accordingly, but also just to stop beating myself up for not being more online and not trying to market myself more. Because I think there is a lot of pressure on artists to be able to do it all, to create the good piece of art, to be able to market yourself, to do all the accounting and the background stuff and all the web stuff. There's a lot of pressure on artists these days to be able to do it or purely because it's just so expensive to get someone else to do it. So this whole exercise of really trying to find myself and learning the differences between content and art has really helped my mindset in that it's just clearer to me now what the hell I'm doing and why I don't necessarily feel encouraged to do what a lot of other people are doing to market the self to market themselves and get attention. It just I think it just always helps when you realize why the hell you're doing things the way that you are, especially when you see so many other people doing it differently and you get so much feedback from business gurus and coaches basically saying this is what you should do and this is how you can be successful. And I think there is something very peaceful about being like, okay, I'm glad that works for you or has worked for you, but that's not going to work for me because this is actually who I am and this is actually what I am creating, which in this case happens to be art and not content.