Should I Try Selling My Digital Art as a Kindle Ebook?

I manage a WordPress blog site for professional couple who enjoys creating their own blog illustration art. They do psychotherapy, blog and write how-to books. The blog has featured dozens of these drawings over the past few years. I recently received this idea from them in an email:

Let’s talk about an idea we’ve had that might bring in some more money – hope hope!  We are wondering if we could do a little book called “Heart Art” and put it on Amazon where it might attract people looking for gifts for Valentine’s Day, Anniversaries, Birthdays, Love Gifts for special occasions, etc.

This was my reply:

Hi, folks.
That's a very cute idea. I like your creative thinking, but I'm going to trim it back a bit. One of the unfortunate downsides of the Internet age has been the considerable devaluation of photography and the graphic arts-- at least as a digital commodity in itself. Digital images of every sort are widely available at everyone's fingertips. Also, while the Kindle ebook medium can include graphics, it is designed such that it really works best with works that are primarily text oriented. Most of the reader devices are monotone and, also, graphics tend to create excessively large downloads.

But, while graphics may not have great direct value they do have considerable indirect value. We see one of the best uses in your blog, of course. The use of an eye-catching graphic illustration can make a big difference in the reading of a blog post.

Some very interesting new ways to use graphic artwork have emerged on the Internet in the last few years. If you've not heard the term, do a search of "infographic". An infographic is usually an entirely graphic creation consisting of both drawings and text with the purpose of making some difficult subject more easily understood. The entire graphic tends to be the full width of a blog column and is often very long vertically. The infographic typically makes it's debut as a blog post, but then is (hopefully) spread around the web as a social media "meme". It generally includes a website name and sometimes is accompanied by a link to the source website. These make for very valuable indirect promotional tools.

So the irony of digital art is that while there is little to be earned by it in it's direct form, there is an ever growing demand for it. New uses are constantly being conceived, so keep thinking. Anyway, this reply is going long, as usual, but I hope it gives you food for thought. We live in a rapidly changing time and even artists must adjust to these changes.

Wade

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Infographic: "Creative Commons - What does it mean?" is copyright (c) 2014 Martin Missfeldt / Bildersuche.org and made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.