A I, Artist and Authenticity
A I is here to stay, it’s up to us to determine for ourselves where it can help and where it becomes detrimental.
As you can see from the pictures above that there are very wonderful ways of using the technology to get across several different ideas in in a single picture which takes far less time than reading a book and therefore a writer without an illustrator at hand is in a dilemma about where he or she needs to draw the line, so-ta-speak.
When I finished my first book, Cafe 66, I looked for a literary agent and every one of them happened to be too busy to even reply to my query letter, much less give counsel or condolences. I therefore was left with little choice but to publish the work independently, so I naturally wanted to do it on the largest platform I could find, to give it ease of access to buyers in the book market and that meant I had to use the Amazon self-publishing. I had no other more realistic choices.
Later, when I was selling it in local cafes with a little sign on my table and a small stack of books and trying to get it into local Boulder bookstores, this fact of how I got the manuscript published, and that I wasn’t in fact a publishing house artist, was snubbed by way of labyrinthine qualifiers, indifferent desk help and local snotty snobs. Which of course said nothing about the quality of the stories in the book but rather spoke volumes about the store owner’s ignorance of what it takes to get the artist’s work to market, especially the book market. In fact, ‘book’ people, those that allege that they have something to do with the marketing of books are the biggest obstacle in the writing business.
This brings us to marketing and the visual hook. I’m a writer, not a marketeer, and my first year attempting to sell the book first book on a person-to-person basis left so many unanswered questions that I was forced to rethink my efforts. The first question was; what qualifies the book to be worth anyone’s time and effort, after all I was asking for at least five hours of their time at a minimum. And this is where AI came into play, as in I quired how my book, the Epic Adventures of Prince Ralphie compared with other children’s classics.
Keep in mind that the AI program is considering all young adult literature in the western tradition; including and especially French young adult literature. needless to say, this is not a survey I, nor anyone I know could have possibly done in a lifetime. And there it is in writing, the style of philosophical meandering in the tale I’ve written about this little green dragon matches perfectly with European, that is to say French literature. i encourage you to look it up!
