Thursday 8 July 2021

life lessons

This pile of books is currently homeless. They're "Illustrator copies" from books I've illustrated over the last 7 years. I have about a zillion Illustrator copies now. On shelves all over the house.

Anyway, we revamped the hallway recently and binned off the old Ikea shelf cube in favour of some rather attractive Mustard Made lockers. Everything that lived on the old Ikea shelves made it's way to The Eldest's bedroom. The books have been sleeping on Jodie's bed for the last two months.

But she came home on Tuesday. And she did not want to sleep with them. And all my other shelves are full.

So I'm gonna have a clearout.

Loads of the copies I have do not bring me joy. The first publisher I ever worked with told me they would be re-using some of the images I illustrated for them in other books. I was 'naive' at the time (Read: completely stupid and clueless as to how the publishing industry usually works) and I said that this was fine. It wasn't fine. Turns out it's normal practice to pay the illustrator a re-use fee when this happens. They did not pay any re-use fees. Still, they were putting a ton of work my way so I shut up and put up. For a long time. Until the extent of the re-use finally dawned on me. And the absolute rubbishness of some of the books. So I stopped working with them. But I still get "new" Illustrator copies of old stuff from time to time. Even now. SEVEN YEARS LATER!

I'm gonna cleanse my soul and get rid of the bloody things, pretend they don't exist. I will only keep the books I was actually involved in, the ones I enjoyed working on and the ones I like. The re-use will be re-homed...to the charity shop probably.

Lesson learned.



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