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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Day 29: In This Position

I

In this position

My story is an exception-

A passionate execution.

My beginning

Was at the inception of misery;

Multiplied opposition-

Human and supernatural

And now lament is ritual.

I am a predestined individual

But it don’t seem that my faith’s got collateral.

Since my beginning

Tragedy has defined the essence

Of my existing

Now I reminisce

In this place of memory’s evanescing.

Cause from my childhood

The good I dreamt

About youth

Remained true fantasies-

Fairy tale excesses.

The streets are the crematorium of destinies,

The cemetery of dreams.

And nobody else has been schooled like me

On this thesis.

I’m letting my pen bleed

As I preach with my soul’s ink

On the lethal repercussion of human greed.

See me in flesh and blood

Rotting in poverty’s spot,

Evil super-imposed before my eyes.

In this gangster’s paradise,

It’s difficult to breathe

Cause the polluting multiplies.

I have witnessed the sun bow down to darkness,

I have struggled with the rage of madness,

I’m living in the eclipse of goodness.

Surviving the time is impossible.

The days are apocalyptic

And decay is inevitable.

II

In this position

My mission has reached a conclusion.

As I battle this pollution

Stash’d in a corner

Like some wasted leftover.

Take a journey thro’ the windows of my eyes

Into the catacomb of a persecuted mind

If you can visualize

What you can’t feel.

I sweat blood to earn a meal

And that was no big deal

Cause my nightmare was kill.

I lived in a mansion

But situation had a passion.

I battled my demons

With terror devised weapons.

Lions, three times my size

With hell’s option for compromise.

But then, I had the end in view

Like a chain-reaction on cue.

The tears betrayed my eyes,

Made it impossible to hide the several sighs.

Money answered all things

Affection became one of those things.

Friendship’s deceit

Hurt deeply like the betrayer’s kiss.

Mates dropped out of school

Like what’s the use?

No one gives one damn about youths;

Not Papa’s tools

That didn’t provide enough food.

And since there ain’t no job opportunity

In the hood

Creativity is one fat bull.

Trauma follows me everywhere,

Hopelessness fogs the atmosphere.

It rains on a sunny day.

And that’s the cost

I have to pay

Since I came to be in this position.

Akpan

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Materials of Poetry

Robinson Jeffers' Hawk Tower

Timeless art is a silhouette embossed on a backdrop of things that never die.

Immortality takes liberty and lends enchantment to works that are wedged by a theme of permanence. Art with a note of continuity possess characteristics that breach generational chasms with timeless messages. It is the piece of clothing left behind after the author is caught up on "Time's winged chariot".

Robinson Jeffers lists two items as the resource of poetry-the lasting qualities that sustain a resonance of impressions in a reader's mind long after the poem is read and the book closed.

One is Permanent things, the other is similar yet, unique, Things forever renewed.

I believe the twosome is for the most part, self explanatory and presents itself to the mind of the reader. Nevertheless, I will take the liberty to touch on details a little bit.

Robert Wallace in his book of poetry, "Writing Poems", fleshes out Jeffers' quote.

"Permanent things or things forever renewed like the grass and human passions, are the materials of poetry; and whoever speaks across the gap of a thousand years will understand that he has to speak of permanent things, and rather clearly too, or who would hear him?"

The upshot of this is that this is also true of other forms of writing like fiction – stories and novels and so on. Shakespeare's works remain relevant to contemporary taste and a big chunk of the credit, besides artistic merit goes to the universal themes of love, betrayal, revenge and the others which characterize Shakespearean literature.

Homer's Iliad is pregnant with pungent subjects of bravery, of lust for wealth and power, of hubristic, you name it. These are problems the race of man will battle world without end as long as there are men on the face of the earth.

We can create a pattern for our writing from these examples. There are lots and lots of cases, of course. Think back to your childhood years-some may have to think longer and harder than most of us. Remember all the stories that have grown up with you and, you see where I'm coming from.

Keep your pen bleeding!

Akpan

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