Dispatches from the bottom rung.

I got a lot of awesome stuff for Christmas from my family and friends, but here's something I got for myself. I only realized that Jeff Vandermeer had published a third (and I suppose final) Ambergris novel when Amazon.com suggested it to me. But I immediately ordered Finch and loved it. So, naturally, when I got to the end and found out Underland Press had two special edition versions available with a lot of extras I was a big enough nerd with enough disposable income to get it.

Here's a view of the Heretic edition packed and sealed in its shipping box. It's wrapped in cloth and closed with a wax seal.

Underland Press gets an A+ for presentation. It really felt like I was getting something special: I even pulled the books out of the package carefully to preserve the wax seal.

Finch started as an earlier, unpublished manuscript that the author explained in his recent AV Club interview was somewhat cannibalized as he wrote the other Ambergris novels (City of Saints and Madmen and Shriek: An Afterword). So the special edition is signed with an excerpt from that novel. It's a big, heavy book in contrast to the slimmer paperback. I haven't even taken it from its prophylactic coating yet.
With the special edition is the "Smashing Todd's Wartime Stout" label, a remnant from the war with the Kalif, the instrumental album that accompanies the book by Murder By Death, a letter from Victoria, the publisher, on Hoegbotton & Sons stationary and a copy of the unfinished first manuscript. It's awesome and I'm glad I got a copy. Even at $110; keeping in mind that it's going to a small publisher (you get a personal email from the publisher when it ships, which is one thing that I like about small businesses).

With the new year and all, I've had occasion to look at how I'm doing lately from a professional standpoint and as a (relatively) new graduate from SVA- it'll be three years since I graduated once May rolls around- I feel pretty good about how I've done so far. That's not to say that I couldn't do better, but I feel like my work has improved a lot since graduating and I'm heading in a more comfortable direction than I was when I left. If the standard you're looking at is some of my most successful peers and mentors, then I'm not doing great: I have a day job, I'm certainly not doing book covers and making a living at it and I haven't won any awards. But when I look at some of my other former classmates there are the people that are struggling to find a day job, those that have a day job but don't make art anymore and those that do both. I think, given how things are right now, it's good that I'm in the third category. I don't love the job, but I've been able to get a relatively consistent stream of work for small publishers in the last few months and this has lead me to feel optimistic about my prospects. It may well dry up after this month and I'll be back to square one, but that's why I work a 9-5 right?

The unfortunate decision that I've had to make, though, is that I can't really volunteer any more. By "volunteer" I mean I can't work for free any more. Namely because I've noticed that after volunteering my work, even if I got some good pieces out of it, I didn't get any new clients. The people I'm working for now are the people I had before I started the uncompensated projects. So, from a practical standpoint, I'm not getting much out of the arrangement; even the promise of exposure isn't enough for me any more. That's not to say that I expect to make the Graphic Artist Guild industry standard for every job; if I make enough to pay for my materials, I'll take the job. I'm not working for Wizards of the Coast or White Wolf or any of the other large gaming companies; most of my clients are very small in the industry, people publishing from their home computers. So I can't expect $200 for a black and white quarter page. It's not going to happen yet. But if I can get $30 or so to cover watercolor paper, ink, carbon and tracing paper and maybe a new brush and the hope of having it at least seen by someone, it's worth my while. You have to take what you can get.

But that's part of why I feel guilty about turning down volunteer work. I'm in the same boat as some of the people asking me to work gratis: we have 9-5s, we have bills to pay and just the hope of scratching our creative itches in our own time. It's tough to come to someone hat in hand and ask them to work for you purely out of enthusiasm for the project with no compensation. Everyone wants the best possible product for the least possible cost. But I have to start being pragmatic. Time spent on a freebie is time I'm not working on a project of my own or a paying job.

And it is sort of depressing looking at what you're "supposed to make" vs. what you actually bring in with the stuff you spent 4 years and so many hours in college learning. The reasons for publishing's decline are many and I won't reiterate but especially for a niche market like fantasy/sci-fi/horror, there's a ton of competition and just the reality that with the internet around, profit margins dwindle and dwindle for publishers. And by extension, those that rely on publishers. Printing is expensive, distribution is expensive. There's someone on the internet willing to give it to you for free, too. It's depressing, but more and more I realize that I may need to rely on having a 9-5 for a very long time, if not forever.

Don't misunderstand me; I'm glad I'm doing what I'm doing and that I am seeing progress. They tell you it's going to be tough in college, they tell you most of your peers won't be doing art 10 years after graduation. Sometimes it's difficult to ignore that elephant in the room, though. The fact that what you do isn't highly valued in the slightest, that even your best efforts can't make up for the fact that only a tiny percentage of an ever expanding pool of people ever really "make it" and that for the rest of us, it's going to stay a hobby, if that.

Sorry, I'm not often that bleak. Well, not as often as I used to be. If that makes sense.