Strategy (and Hope) for the Stubborn Artist

A recent essay in the New York Times Book Review quotes Jonathan Galassi, president of Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, as defending the potential of the books that get the least marketing effort and sell the fewest copies.

This situation, he says, "is where the major writers of the future usually start. It's where much of the best writing is, the work of the ODD, UNCOOPERATIVE, INTRACTABLE, PIGHEADED AUTHORS who insist on seeing and saying things their own way and change the game in the process. The 'system' can only recognize what it's already cycled through. What's truly new is usually indigestible at first."

I tell myself that. And at the same time I know it's easy to discount criticism of my work as lack of appreciation for genius. (please take that comment in the ironic way it was intended)

HERE'S MY STRATEGY: I do my work the way I want it. Then if it doesn't sell the first time out, I take any feedback and revise in a way I think will satisfy the editor and that still is true to my vision, my voice, my purpose.

Sometimes I go through that process several times before a book sells. And it takes a godawful long time. But I've always felt that the book was better. And I take comfort in remaining fundamentally pigheaded, though it may not always show.