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

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Still Standing

I once saw a four year old on crutches he’s managed to use pretty effectively he didn’t look invalid. (He’s not the boy in this picture.) This poem is for him, if he would take a chance on life. I’m believing he would. This is also for me. April 16’s my birthday.

I feel my tongue loosen like a caged bird set free

As I taste the first fruits of enchanted poetry.

Indulge me for a sec., will ya? If you got the time.

Let me transport you on the train of my rhyme.

Nudge of inspiration breaks my paralysis,

Melting my numbness, she lifts me above controversies.

Forgive me if I dally a little too close to the lip of excess

But some things get in your system and set you off on a tangent.

Nothing succeeds like success

I should know. I’m nothing if not a duty pageant.

I am the drowning man clutching at a straw;

I am the one who’s lost everything but what?

I’m still standing.

I am neck-deep in water but I still got that one straw

I take the tiger by the tail and hang on.

People often wonder where my strength lies

Often surprised how I rode the lows to get to my highs.

I try to make them see I’m no empty vessel

Their faces tell they wouldn’t believe me if this was the gospel.

I am walking upwind

The point, I’d have you note, is I’m walking.

I have parted the storm clouds,

And I’ve seen the silver lining.

I pledge allegiance to hope, here and now

To keep coming every time I fall. Even when I’m crying

I’m still standing.

There’s a dream so real you can reach out and touch it.

I believe this like I believe in the certainty of tides and sunrise.

I’ve roamed the pits so long my fears became shallow,

And my fascination with death shrunk to a shadow.

I am the voice of one yelling from the hardpan;

I am the strength of a dying, desperate man.

I put up with the sting of rejection;

Stuck out beneath the weight as I battled depression.

For several years, I braced amazing disgrace;

I’ve fallen down time and time and time again.

While I may not be your prototype testimony,

My story must have sprouted a tumor of memory.

Still stomping . . .

Still counting . . .

Still standing.

Akpan

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Card #4: Discarded ft. Patti La Belle

Patti La Belle

‘Tis the season to be jolly

But how can I be when I have nobody?

A silent night, I know it’s gonna be

Joy to the world but it’s gone be sad for me

                             Patti La Belle,

                             What Do The Lonely Do At Christmas?

‘This is December!’

Said the kid with the stainless steel bowl.

‘This is December!’

He repeated, as if to confirm the elementary deduction.

‘And I can’t quite recall the last time I was with family.’

The cold twilit December draft dug its claws into his flesh

That tainted Christmas Eve. 

‘I wish I had a family.

‘God, I wish I had a cat, a dog . . .

‘Some pet to keep me company,’

The beggar boy moaned.

But all he had was his stainless steel bowl

And the enthusiastic voices chanting carols

As he filled his spot on the stoop

Of the Church of St. Luke.

Eneh

Put The Fuel On It

In these days, the urge is pressing to be keen on what you do and to convey a measure of elegance into the practice of it. Outside is busting with millions of attractive distractions. Quite a few of these pests are almost worth the abandon of a life long career as a writer and to lay pursuit. "Almost", but not quite. And of course, you know "almost" don't count in the upward climb.

It is a fine line between idling and rusting. You may want to stack your writer resources on your way out because faster than you can see it coming, you'll be out like a candle in a storm. It's a 100% guarantee! Thinking you can switch in and out of the zone at will and at alarming irregularity is a signal there's a lot of soap opera history you haven't caught up on yet. On becoming a writer worthy of the name, anyway.

Consistency sets your bones afire as it does preserve your juice in a blanket of warmth when you have to make the little deals that take you off your writing. But, with the outward pull of enthusiastic temptations trying to trap your attention, you have a battle on your hands, a war you must win. Passion is the flare that ignites the dynamite. But, passion, on a personal level, is a process. I hardly make out that distinct quality but as product of an intense other. More on that later.

From another angle on a broader plane, you can only be consistent at something you have fallen for; something that really turns you on; works your genius and makes your consciousness spring each time it crosses your mind. I don't invite my dreams, but with the certainty of tides rising high, they will keep walking through the walls of my unconsciousness in all their arrays; the horrifying, the terrifying and the gross out. My muse does make uninvited visits too and I do try to the best of my ability to keep him entertained during the periods of his stay. Yet, I can and do make appointments with my muse. I must if I want to succeed as a writer. This idea has its own arresting clarity.

Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working. Picasso

There's a process at the helm of everything that is continuing. Passion as a rule, is not an exception. I view this like a sort of teamwork going on. Without consistency, passion is nothing but paperwork, it never comes to anything like a wild stab in pitch darkness. You just can't groom passion without consistency. It's a two-sided coin in spite of everything; consistency feeds on your passion and grows fat on the stimulus. Your passion is a drive, a hunger that comes with a twinge of appetite for consistency. Get up and get going, already. Once you find your itinerary, stick to it with passion. Be consistent at that one thing. Read. Research. Write and Read. Read ten times as much as you write.

Life is everything we plug into it. Our writing grows and matures if inspired. We actually thrive beyond elementary stages when our passion, touched by stints of consistent attendance at our writing tables, drives us into the heart of what we do. The impact eventually, turning us into human hand grenades.

When passion comes, with it comes creativeness. Guess an element of truth exists in the age-old writer slogan,

Write With Passion!

Keep your pen bleeding!

Akpan

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