For anyone who knows me, it should come as no surprise that I spend a lot of time thinking about the economics of art. As an artist and creative business coach, one of the questions that occupies my thoughts is “How do we get more people to spend more money on art?” (And I want to clarify here that by art, I mean art, craft, handmade goods, and really any other creative pursuit that humans put out into the world.)
But what is surprising, even to me, is that during one of these thinking sessions, I started down a line of questioning that led me somewhere I’d never gone before. “How do we get people to spend more money on art?” led to “What if people spent as much money on art as they did on their cars?” Which led to “What if people didn’t need cars, because they could travel through art?” And suddenly I was off. Not because I’d suddenly found the answer to every artist’s economic woes. But because, I realized with a shock, I had an idea for a novel.
So that’s what I’ve been doing for the past year. While I’ve been making jewelry and doing retail shows and running Artists & Profit Makers and ignoring Instagram, I’ve also been writing a novel.
And I’m excited to share that the paperback version is available to pre-order now from my website!
While this book is different than the six I’ve previously published (those were all non-fiction and this is very, very much fiction and set in an imagined world at that) it does share one theme that permeates all my work: it’s a love letter to art.
It’s also, if we’re being honest, the fulfillment of a life-long dream, one I’ve had since I was five years old, dictating stories to an older girl on the school bus who wrote them down for me.
I might not yet have solved the “getting more people to spend more money on art” problem in a big way in the real world (though I like to think I help artists work on it on a smaller scale all the time) but that didn’t stop me from imagining a fantasy world where an art form (in this case, I landed on tapestry weaving) plays such an important role in people’s lives.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how I want to face the next four years, and one of the things I keep coming back to is the power of imagination. The power of “what if?” We can’t create a different world if we can’t first imagine it into being.
And while the world I ended up creating in my novel can only ever exist as fantasy (unless someone wants to invent a form of travel that involves stepping through fabric) I’d like to think it plays a small part in getting people to imagine a world where artists and makers are a valued (and even revered) part of society.
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PS. If you prefer to read your books digitally (or are not based in the US and would like a cheaper shipping option) my novel will be available in digital and paperback forms on Amazon on March 4th. Or you can pre-order a signed copy now directly from me!