Eneh Akpan Writes: 5 Ways to Tell Your Art Will Sell

Sunday, January 6, 2013

5 Ways to Tell Your Art Will Sell

No one can guarantee you will meet success in a particular field.

Photo: berightback.nl

It's probably, okay to have somebody to talk to when walking that sensitive path towards choosing a lifelong career. They might even point you to what you're good at or better off doing. But you will still have to battle the question of whether or not people will buy into your idea, your talent or your craft-whatever road your heart is bent on traveling.

These 5 steps are not exactly open sesames but they might get you started and guide you in making the right decision. The following points are not arranged in any particular order.

Study the Market

Except you do not intend to have a career that puts bread on your table and a roof over your head, you need to have a feel for what the market wants. The literary taste buds of an audience alters one generation to the next. Today's readers might be easily thrown off by Lovecraft's style of writing and without argument, balk at Shakespearean literature. The publishing business is a rapidly evolving industry and you have to keep up with the shifts if you don't want to be left behind.

Get a Role Model

This step is absolutely necessary. If you have somebody going up ahead of you, somebody who's impressed bold footprints in the sands of time by calling up all his experience-forged resourcefulness, you got leverage. There's a very strong chance you would meet with less frustration than you would going it alone on the long and winding road of your calling without a role model.

Do the thing You Love and are Passionate About

After all is said and done, your choice of career should be the craft you've fallen head over heels for. It should be art and it must give you style and class-a level of dignity that presents the real you as you are to your world. Art must be self-expression or it is not. Who you decide to be recognized as and What you choose to be identified with must be a medium through which you can channel your passion. Everything else must come after. Make no bones about it.

If You Got It Flaunt It

In doing our best and thrusting ourselves wholly and in complete abandon into our chosen field we get a foretaste of who/what we seek to become. This is what's required if we must settle all manner of doubts in our minds. If you are a writer, you can effectively prove a genre is appropriate for you when you immerse yourself into writing a lot of fiction in your pet genre. Do it over and over again, when you feel like it and (ideally) when you don't feel anything like it. Bury yourself totally in your work and let it define and recreate you.

Stay On Your Grind

Fans need you to establish you are not going to put an egg in your shoe and beat it just when they're just beginning to feel your vibe. You need to bring persistence to bear and demonstrate to your readers that you can adapt (there's the word I've been meaning to get at) to the swings and shifts in the industry. That you can stand true and withstand the test of time.

There it is. It's not magic but at least you got a a fighting chance of being sure you're headed in the right direction, to even know there is a direction. You possess an opportunity to perfect by pruning or polishing, your craft and discover what else needs to be done before you are ready to take over the world.

Keep your pen bleeding!

Akpan