[Julie Steiner]

Nick, I hate to break it to you, but there is no Tiara Fairy going around crowning Good Work in ANY artistic field—be it poetry or popular music—with the money, accolades and attention it deserves.

You can blame other people's ignorance for their lack of appreciation for what you do, if that makes you feel better about the fact that most people have no interest in reading poetry. But it sounds both naïve and narcissistic to expect the universe to provide your favored material with fans, simply because you deem it More Worthy of Fame, Glory, and Financial Reward than the stuff that is currently receiving those things.

There's no escaping this fact: Artists who want to have an appreciative audience have to do the necessary self-promotion work. They have to seek and seize opportunities to build and retain a fan base. The Tiara Fairy won't do it for them simply due to their work's intrinsic merit.

Yes, some fields (such as popular music) offer more robust existing infrastructure for audience-building than other fields (such as poetry). But there's no escaping the fact that successful artists spend a lot of time, attention, and effort on things other than creating the art.

People who are not willing or able to work hard at the business side of their artistic careers have ABSOLUTELY NO RIGHT to sit around bitching about the fame and financial success of those who do, or to sneer at them as somehow less virtuous, artistically speaking, because they aren't devoting themselves purely to creation.

Show me someone who is successful in any artistic field—yes, even popular music!—and I will show you someone who would snort at the idea that their success came easily. Successful artists work damned hard at figuring out how to put what they do in front of the people with whom it will resonate. They also invest a lot of time and money in hiring (or marrying) the right people to work damned hard on their behalf.

And usually they have to spend the majority of their time working on things that aren't what they really want to do, but for which there is demand, just to pay the bills. If producing the kind of work that other people want to pay for sounds like selling out, maybe selling shouldn't be your main measure of artistic success.

But if money IS an important measure of artistic success to you—and it certainly sounds like it is, because you keep mentioning sales—you will need to spend far more time promoting your work than you do creating it. Or, if you can't stand the heat of the marketplace's supply and demand dynamics, I would advise you to get out of the economic kitchen.

It sounds like you are opting for the latter in practice, but are still theorizing about artistic success in monetary terms. I don't think trying to have it both ways is going to be a recipe for happiness.

I hope these thoughts are helpful.