Three different, essential ways for us to value our creative work

Getting clarity around these values may help us to go further and feel less despondent during the tough times!

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the different values we place on creativity, especially as there’s so much brilliant and honest work here on Substack about both the joys and struggles of the author journey. It can be hard to continue to value what we’re doing when we constantly have the unforgiving marketplace and online spaces reflecting distorted determinations of our value back at us – so here I’ve tried to break down and reflect on the different ways of valuing our work. These correlate with three key questions that can be very useful to think about before we begin any creative project:

What will this work offer you? (Intrinsic value)
What will this work offer others? (Cultural value)
Where will it sit in the marketplace? (Marketplace value)

Intrinsic value 

Intrinsic value is the value we get from the practice of creativity, through our own explorations and efforts to produce unique work. Without this, it’s very hard to sustain creative work – however, this space is also incredibly challenging as we must dig deep to find the roots of what we’re trying to achieve. It’s a place that asks for soul searching and honesty, for us to sit in discomfort and vulnerability; but it can also be incredibly rewarding watching our work progress and evolve, and each breakthrough can be exciting and self-affirming.

Pursuing the intrinsic value in our creativity is an act of courage, as it requires us to experiment on the page, to be prepared to fail, and sometimes to realise that our sentences are undernourished, our themes are floundering, and our grand vision is faltering. However, it’s also a space where we are free to play with our creative ideas – in complete privacy if we wish, or with input from trusted others.

Without intrinsic value, our work is meaningless to us. Without it, why would we bother? Therefore, intrinsic value is the essential foundation of creative practice, and the cornerstone on which all other values must rest.

Cultural value

There are countless ways in which our writing and creativity can offer cultural value once our work is shared: and by shared I mean simply the meeting of two minds, not the necessity of reaching thousands. Any desire to write for a reader is done with shared connection as the ultimate goal, but a book doesn’t have to be a bestseller to be important – you only need one reader to have a deep sense of connection to your work, and you’ve made an impact.

Cultural value is amplified when one reader then shares their experience with another potential reader, and on and on, which is why books often become bestsellers via word of mouth, because this overtakes even the best publicity, marketing efforts and expenditure of a publisher.

Whether it’s a novel that provokes an emotional response, a non-fiction work that speaks to personal questions and challenges, or a book that provides information and asks for a wider examination of the state of our world, these all offer unique contributions to our culture and add value to our collective cultural repository. Another layer of value is then added by the fact each book provides us with the opportunity to have shared reading experiences and discussions.

Therefore, while a work doesn’t have to be shared to have value (it can be done purely for the intrinsic value of its creator), when it is shared, the possibilities of its value begin to compound. If only it stayed this simple, because here we get to the tricky third aspect of value: one so powerful that it’s capable of distorting our ideas of both intrinsic and cultural value – but only if we let it.

Marketplace value

Marketplace value is the space that so often trips us up, because if we’re trying to earn any kind of living from our work, marketplace value is just as vital – perhaps more so at times – than intrinsic value. A writer needs to eat and pay the bills as much as they need to have their life enriched by the processes and joys of writing. Having a second source of income is therefore essential for the sanity of 99% of authors, and most writers choose to hold down part-time jobs or continue with other occupations that provide them with more financial stability. Even authors who write ‘full-time’ often make some proportion of their living from the teaching and speaking components of their writing career – for a very good reason:

The marketplace is very, very hard, and often unstable and unpredictable.

And yet, after the affirmative experience of writing and all the hopes that go with submitting a work for publication, it’s very difficult to approach marketplace value from a non-emotional perspective, with the clear-eyed strategy we need to succeed as writers. This is because while we understand the marketplace is precarious, we still long with all our heart for it to fully recognise and endorse the intrinsic and cultural value of our work.

Nevertheless, marketplace value is not fixed in the same way as the other two values, but goes up and down based on many factors, often outside our control. We only need to think about all those authors working on their books for years and then publishing during Covid, while the stores were closed and no events were happening, to understand how soul-destroying market factors can be. When you’ve poured your heart onto the page, everything feels so very, very personal; but while we might care deeply, the marketplace doesn’t respond to our feelings. It cannot care, because it is not an emotional space, it is driven by dollar signs and profit.

Therefore, it’s no surprise that there are many, many books full of essential wisdom and great stories that DON’T find broad readerships, and which barely sell enough to pay a utility bill never mind cover a monthly wage. It often appears as though a lot of books need to sink so that a few might swim, which makes the marketplace feel like a disempowering space – full of rejections, dead-ends, and dashed or diminished expectations and dreams, even for many of the books that are published. And on top of this, the marketplace demands productivity, and the kind of continual adherence to deadlines that is not always possible in life and creative work - where artists are often struggling for the time and means to continue and must be lucky enough to have a life stable and secure enough for them to pursue creative work. Different players in the marketplace will also happily scoop up a large percentage of the profits, meaning authors must become savvy about contract negotiations, or at least have a very good agent or lawyer!

It makes sense, then, that if this is the trickiest part of publishing – and if we still want to publish after reading all this – we must pay a lot of attention to the market, keep on our toes, and consider how best to get our work out to readers. Is it our dream to hand things over to an agent and hopefully to one of the BIG publishers with fingers crossed that our book will be one of those they’ll truly get behind (because when they do, nothing we can do as individuals comes close to one of their big marketing campaigns)? This might gain us more time to focus on writing, but it might also mean we have less control of the outcomes. Or, do we want to look for more niche publishers and areas in the market, take on extra work for ourselves in exchange for more control, and seek out our own possibilities for promotion?

The good news is that it’s a very good time to try different approaches (and we don’t need the same approach for every book), because there are many, many people trying to innovate in the publishing space. However, the most important thing we can do is to make ourselves aware of all the options so we can find the right ones for us. Even if we can’t achieve our ideal scenario, our second or third choices might still bring some excellent opportunities. With a little bit of out-of-the-box thinking, and clear-eyed recognition of the potentials and pitfalls around different styles of publishing, perhaps we can slowly find more spaces where we belong, while collectively shifting the marketplace into something more satisfying and rewarding for authors. This is a long-term undertaking, but if we want to sell or share our work, we need to get curious rather than cynical about the marketplace, while using the answers to each of our three value questions to keep us grounded and focused on what we’re hoping to achieve.

In some of my future posts I’ll look more closely at different publishers and ways we can get our work into the market. Meanwhile, when the marketplace feels overwhelming and unfriendly, let’s remind ourselves that it really isn’t personal, and ensure we return to our intrinsic values more often – the heart-centre of our creativity – because this is really the beginning and the end of everything we do.

Thanks for reading - and remember to look out for my name alongside my new Substack branding later this week when I send out September’s Author Notes.

And if you got value from this post, please restack it or share with a creative friend, to help me amplify its reach!