Pouring My Art Out

I am, I have to say, crushed… filled with self-doubt… and also with an anger that I don’t know whether to aim at myself or in a more outward direction.

You know the post I did the other day, the one where I proudly… oh so proudly… proclaimed to the world that my second self-illustrated book for children is now available for sale? I just got another comment on that post. It was short, concise, and very to-the-point. All it said was:

’15 dollars plus shipping for 31 pages – really?’

I don’t even know where to begin.

I have tried to explain that I am all art-side-of-the-brain. I can’t market myself, or promote myself. I will never be a success. I have always known that. I am also manic-depressive, so I tend to wander between delusions of my science fiction series being made into movies and me doing the talk show circuit and looking at the few dozen books I have sold and thinking I am spending a lot of time and energy trying to do something I love that maybe very few other people will also love.

My wife and kids give me a hard time about the way I always seem to undervalue everything I do. Believe me, I made the argument that all my books are overpriced… even though the publishers take most of that money. I let my older daughter talk me into pricing the novels at $10.00 and the two kid books at $15.oo, but only reluctantly. My family made a lot of good arguments, none of them having to do with greed. They said, in essence, that selling the books too cheaply would make people think they weren’t worth any more than that.

The thing is… and this is a thing that I have given a lot of thought to… but I sweat and bleed all my art, and the writing most particularly. Yes, writing a book for young children might not seem as hard as crafting a thousand pages of science fiction or a gripping murder mystery. But you all saw the posts I did while I made this new book, right? All the art is hand drawn and painted, and then cleaned up and mixed together in Photoshop. There are a few thousand hours worth of work in this one book.

So what is my time worth?

Yes, I am sorry about the shipping cost, but that isn’t me. If you go into a Barns and Noble… before they become extinct, and look at the prices of the books in there, is fifteen bucks really unreasonable?

If it is, then I apologize.

I am not doing this to get rich. Yes, I would like to make a living doing something I love rather than getting another minimum wage job I hate. I know that to a working person, 15 dollars is real money. But how much did you spend last time you went to McDonald’s? Or Starbucks? What is it worth to support another person’s dream? What is the value of a bunch of words and pictures that will let you share some quality time with a young child, discussing the life lessons carefully strewn throughout both my books for kids? How do we determine the worth of any kind of art?

I’m not whining. I am very lucky. My wife is working while I do all this writing, and to be honest, the small account I started to fund this venture is bleeding money rather than swelling with it… because, while I get a slight discount when I order my own books, I have to pay for shipping too, and I need to order a few copies of each book before we get all the small glitches worked out… and then I have to buy a few on the off chance that a family member or friend might want to buy one.

So I am feeling a little vulnerable right now, because this comment hit me right where I am weakest… right in the part of me that questions whether my words make any difference to anyone but me.