Comments on: THE ART OBJECT, Part II: How to sell a book that costs $7,000

By: Aaron

Aaron — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 22:05:07 +0000

I thought it was funny when, in Part II, you posed the Chihuly question hypothetically. Because if “a novel about flowers with a [Chihuly] cover of, say, blown glass flowers sell as well?” the answer is obviously: yes. Wasn’t that what the rest of Part II was about? When you connect enough big names and brands, you sell a lot of Star Wars-themed Legos.

Which is why I think this whole convo boils down to AUDIENCE. And the economics of audience. Kaelan, selling your first novel for a dollar (or giving away, say, a thousand copies) broadens your potential audience, because fewer people will do what Gladwell calls “having to make a judgment.”

The ins and outs of more people reaching for something cheaper are obvious and boring, but I think the ways Scribd and other elegant, new distribution processes can link more art to more people’s phone-devices raises a new issue: fairness. What price is fair for a product from and unproven artist/publisher?

This is where (I think) artists and publishers need to swallow their pride and really think hard about the supersaturated present. I don’t think the assumed quality or historical price point of a thing should determine the price (the $10 album, for example, doesn’t make sense to me).

Especially when the ultimate size of an audience can determine a career: get more people in the tent, and there will always be another, newer way to monetize (like a limited edition of ten where Vincent Gallo impregnates each person that buys a copy for $500K!).

By: kaelan

kaelan — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:52:57 +0000

For whatever insane reason, design is more salable than content. I think that the internet has helped to de-value, in monetary terms, the written word because of the sheer volume of words online. And yet the internet has helped with the dissemination of texts. We know that we’re going to have a more and more difficult time marketing content, and we have to look at others ways of packaging that content so we can make a profit. Otherwise, how do we do this for a living?

Opium 8 is a great example of using design as a method for increasing sales. The same number of people who actually read Opium 7 will read Opium 8, I would assume, but five or six times as many people will buy Opium 8, or at least the issue will leave Todd’s apartment five or six times faster. They’re almost sold out already, and the magazine came out two months ago.

By: Andrew O. Dugas

Andrew O. Dugas — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:30:11 +0000

Reading the bit about the cover artists bringing their own renown to bear on the valuation of the book as object, I can’t help but think about the recent cover for Opium Magazine Issue 8 that artist Jonathan Keats came up with, a nine-word story that will be revealed one word a century (due varying layers of ink that should fade accordingly) over the next millennium. The cover has gotten a lot of press, home and abroad, including two mentions on NPR.

Of course, not one of the press items mentions anything about what’s between the covers of the issue.