The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I guess I’ve been working in art for about 45 years. Some of it I’ve been doing okay at, even made a so-called Living at, and most of it, well, I’m not the poster child for Starving Artist, but maybe Anorexic Artist. We artists have a tough row to hoe in corporate America, that’s the truth, and so we try all sorts of strategies ranging from art fair booths to just giving up and getting a job, a real job. But probably too late for one that pays well or offers benefits and pensions. The money belongs to the Job Creators. Us creators, well, good luck.

I went up into the mountains this past weekend with a box of the Skeeter Daddle Blues, hoping to do a book reading and maybe sell a few copies. Ever since my old outlets for book sales dried up, I’ve been headscratching how to market these babies, get them out of my basement and into the hands of folks hungry for great literature. Tyee Store closed up and so did the Copy This Mail That office supply store that sold the first book Skeeter Daddle Diaries so well I ordered a second printing. The South End String Band CD’s sold like hotcakes too at those places, but when they closed shop, the only show in town was the Snow Goose Bookstore. And now they’ve shuttered their doors too. We probably sold two to three thousand CD’s before that. I sold maybe 1000 books. Not bad for a backwash.

This past year I haven’t sold more than ten books and the band is giving CD’s away at concerts for ‘the price we finally figured they were worth’. For free. One concert alone we handed out 150 CD’s.

A high tech, fast charging friend convinced me to try Amazon. Against my better judgement I signed on, figuring I’d be sending them a box of hot sellers they could pass out faster than candy on Halloween. But no, they wanted me to send one book at a time, priority mail, to their warehouse in Maryland or someplace far far away. I spent about $5 per book for mailing envelope and postage, losing a couple of bucks on each one. This went on for a couple of months, never enough sales apparently, to justify shipping them a full box. I might have continued this brilliant sales strategy right into bankruptcy but one day I noticed Amazon, love these guyz, had used copies of the Skeeter Diaries listed at 1.99 plus shipping. This was great. Me competing against me and the only winner was Amazon. It took me awhile to get out of this crummy cycle, the company not really responsive to any inquiries. In fact, they had no way to make inquiries.

I finally just kept sending them messages on the sales requests that the book was Out of Print. Which, finally, it was. Sadly, I buy my own book back from them occasionally just to have a few copies around. Cheaper than reprints by far. Bookstores competing against Bezos, like I mentioned at the last Snow Goose reading before they closed shop, are like Godzilla vs Bambi, it won’t be long before they’re toejam. Now I see where they’d like to be my printer too, print on demand. Probably ship them to me, then have me ship them back each sale. Lose even more money on every point of sale.

So I wish I had a tried and true strategy for you prospective artists out there looking for ways to sell your wares, I really do. It was always dog eat dog, but now we got Godzilla too. My only advice is to be like the little furry creatures during the Dinosaur Era, stay low, keep a close eye out, maybe move at night. I know, not much help, but the trick is to survive.

You want to learn something about Failure, ask an artist. We been there, we done that, we’ll probably do it again. Some folks think failure is an excuse to quit, chalk it up to hard knocks, move on to something else. Artists, we have ourselves on the line. We’re painting, we’re writing, we’re singing something, integral to ourselves. We can’t sell it, we can’t get approval; we can’t make others see what it is we see, the beauty of it, the truth of it, we can’t just walk away, shrug it off, pick up a hammer and become a carpenter. If we do, the house we’re building becomes the art. And I bet you dollars to Degas we aren’t going to become bond traders next.

The trouble with failure for us artists is we’re forced to make sense of it. It’s not really external, some quirk of bad luck, even if, for awhile, we rationalize it. We live in a market place society, for good or bad. We live and die by the cash register. And that society doesn’t much care about any art other than Mass Commercial Art. Odds are pretty certain, you’ll fail. So you have to ask yourself, why go on?

I had two gallery owners on the island tell me their definition of art was simple: it’s what sells. The Van Gogh earlobe ‘myth’ of a guy killing himself with only one sale to his name, then becoming discovered, was hogwash, they said. Sales, that’s the measure, darling, that’s the bar to reach if you want to be a success.

I know too many South Enders who are fine artists who don’t rack up sales. A couple are great artists and they make the least money. I would cry out loud and flush my credit card if they quit because revenues were paltry. We do what we do out of a need to recreate the world, to make it over to resemble ourselves, to make manifest that inchoate yearning we feel and need to express in some way or other. On the South End this is fairly normal — most other places, this a definition of failure. No need to tell you, but …. I sure don’t plan to move any time soon.