The Book of the Erinyes

As I’ve been work­ing on The Book of the Erinyes I’ve been try­ing to work out who it’s likely to appeal to.

The prob­lem is that it doesn’t fit com­fort­ably in any one area. It sits between art and craft, between book­bind­ing and book art, between main­stream and under­ground. It’s art made in the interstices.

Per­son­ally I find inter­sti­tial art to be more inter­est­ing, but as an artist it makes it very hard to find exist­ing mar­kets in which to pro­mote it.

When you’re try­ing to sell or pro­mote art­work (or indeed any­thing) the first thing you need to under­stand is your poten­tial audi­ence, because this usu­ally dic­tates how and where you mar­ket your art­work. There are many exist­ing routes you can use if your work fits neatly into a genre or dis­cip­line, but if your work floats between estab­lished defin­i­tions then it’s far more difficult.

This chain of thought led me to the Inter­sti­tial Arts Found­a­tion, which was foun­ded by a group of lit­er­ary, visual, musical, and per­form­ance artists for the pur­pose of devel­op­ing and pro­mot­ing inter­sti­tial art. There’s quite a lot to digest on their web­site, and I’ve only read a frac­tion of it so far, but I recom­mend it as a very inter­est­ing col­lec­tion of ideas.

How­ever I’m still left with the prob­lem of how to get The Book of the Erinyes “out there” — how to raise aware­ness of it so that I can sell some cop­ies of the lim­ited edi­tion hand­made book and of the vari­ous other related art­work (I’m plan­ning an unlim­ited paper­back print-on-demand ver­sion, and vari­ous lim­ited edi­tion post­cards, not to men­tion a free ebook version).

My per­sonal view (and, please, if you have a dif­fer­ent view, leave me a com­ment below) is that The Book of the Erinyes might appeal to two key audiences:

1. Book Arts/Bookbinding Arts — a more tra­di­tional arts audi­ence, albeit still in a grey area between the more fine-art area of Book Arts & Artist’s Books, and the more craft-orientated area of Book­bind­ing. And of course it also involves Let­ter­press print­ing, which is another sep­ar­ate area!
2. Arty & Weird — this is my work­ing name for a sub-cultural strand that seems to cross vari­ous bound­ar­ies, but can be broadly defined as those people who have an interest in art com­bined with one or more of the fol­low­ing interests:
   • graphic nov­els (par­tic­u­larly those by people like War­ren Ellis and Neil Gai­man, and the Hell­blazer series),
   • goth or altern­at­ive music sub-culture,
   • films by David Lynch or Terry Gilliam,
   • books by the likes of Neil Gai­man, China Miéville, and Jeff VanderMeer.

   I prom­ise I’ll try to think of a bet­ter name for this imperfectly-defined audi­ence  — if one already exists please let me know!

So, hav­ing worked out who I think might be inter­ested in The Book of the Erinyes I now have to find ways to reach them.

And this is where you, dear reader, come in. I’m soli­cit­ing sug­ges­tions and ideas as to how to reach my tar­get audi­ences.  Please leave me a com­ment below if you have any ideas.

EDIT: Thanks to the Inter­sti­tial Arts Found­a­tion for cit­ing & dis­cuss­ing this post.

A very quick post to say that you can fol­low the pro­gress of this pro­ject (and of my other pro­jects) by fol­low­ing me on Twitter.

Just go to twitter.com/lazcorp and click ‘follow’.

I have this mad idea — I want to make a movie trailer for my hand­made lim­ited edi­tion artist’s book.

I’ve been won­der­ing how to pro­mote the Book of the Erinyes and I real­ised it’s going to be dif­fi­cult.  It’s not just one image—it’s a whole book of images and text—so I can’t just put one big image on a web page.

My first idea (which I may still do) is a video or flash wid­get show­ing each page, with a hand turn­ing the pages at inter­vals (or on the click of a button).

Once I’d got that idea I thought “why not make a trailer”.  Well, why not? So that’s just what I’m going to do.  As I pro­gress with the Book of the Erinyes pro­ject I’m going to record clips for a movie-style trailer (as well as per­haps a “Mak­ing of…”).  And I’ll put them all up on the inter­net for free.

I’ve just bor­rowed a Sam­sung VPL600 Video 8 cam­era from my friend Sooty, and I’ve got the stu­dio lights that I use for pho­to­graphy.  Now I just need someone with a very low grav­elly voice for the oblig­at­ory omin­ous voice-over…