Art and Additional Materials

Visual art seems to enjoy pride of first place among the aesthetic fields. One of the primary reasons for its universal appeal is probably its immediacy. Anyone can get the gist of a drawing or painting after even a cursory glimpse, but extracting the meat of a literary piece takes significantly more time and effort. Artists, therefore, seem to achieve recognition more easily than writers.

If you want a practical example, try finding a comic book publisher who's accepting unsolicited script submissions. Even bigger studios periodically have open calls for new artists, but unless a story is accompanied by finished pencils at least, good luck getting it in the door.

An interesting observation I made during my unsuccessful bid to launch a web comic is that, while many authors (myself included) openly admit that they can barely manage artwork equaling grade school notebook sketches, every artist I've ever spoken to judges his writing to be on par with his art.

Having been rebuffed by pencilers who already had stories to go along with their artwork, and thus no need for me, I resolved to abandon comics for the time being in order to focus on novels--an medium dedicated entirely to the written word...or so I thought, until I came upon a common clause included in many standard book contracts imposing upon the author the obligation of providing additional materials, including original art.

Since, as I stated, I can't draw, the obvious answer was to include no artwork in my book, other than the front and back cover, which are the publisher's problem. However, I soon discovered that the standard contract specifies that the inclusion of additional artwork is at the publisher's sole discretion. If I do get a book deal, the publisher can demand interior art. Now, publishers know very well that there's every chance a particular author can't draw or paint as well as he can write (a rare combination despite what many artists seem to think), so they add a clause stipulating that the author will be forced to pay for the services of a third-party artist (or even the publisher's own art department).

Usually the publisher will just go ahead and farm out the production of additional materials for the novel, including permissions and indexes (or even maps made by actual cartographers) in addition to original art. Then they'll charge a debit to the author's account which, like the advance, is recoupable via royalties.

Long story short, if you're an author with a book deal on the horizon, make sure to renegotiate these generally unfavorable provisions of most standard literary contracts.