Category: General

 

About 11 years ago I was puzzling over how to make my microscopic art business grow. A friend (aka “Limeygirl”) proposed I write a book to feature my art. I laughed aloud, and said “People don’t write books!”, meaning people such as myself. She said “Of course they do, Silly!”As I pondered her suggestion, it came to me that what I knew and drew best was (and remains) Mineral King.  How does one write a book? For guidance, I wrote a letter (this was when snail mail was still sort of normal) to my friend and cabin neighbor Jane Coughran, who was at that time a picture editor for Time-Life Books. She said that if I would be willing to include historical photographs, she would help me. Took me about 1/2 a second to agree!

 

Together, we formed Cabinart Books, a publishing company for the purpose of making a book about the cabins of Mineral King. (Silly aside – choosing a title for the book was quite difficult. I had read that every book with the word “naked” in it becomes a best-seller, so we thought briefly about calling our book “The Naked Cabin”.) We planned the chapters, each page, how it would be shaped, where there would be drawings, text, quotes, and photos. We sent an advice-seeking questionnaire to anyone we remotely knew who had published a book. We learned about Library of Congress Card Catalog, ISBN, copyrights, permissions, bar codes, book binders, and even trucking companies. We sent a questionnaire to many many cabin people seeking stories and quotations, went on a quest for old photos and permission to use them. 

 

We spent 3 weeks together in Mineral King laying out the look of our book and photographing the cabins from every conceivable angle. Some of the cabins were in places that precluded a good photograph, others had nothing of apparent significance or obvious beauty, so we circled them and discussed their various attributes until something of interest emerged.

 

We planned our timing to have the book appear in early November. Janey found a book designer to prepare the pages for the printer. She began compiling the quotes and writing the text. I started drawing and drawing and drawing – 150 pictures in all. Several were borrowed back from the folks who had commissioned me to draw their cabins, but many of my earlier drawings no longer met my new standards. (I have been asking several of those folks to let me have their drawings back so I can fix them but this only makes them laugh at me!) To pay for all of this, I got a business line of credit and we presold as many books as possible.  We had carefully calculated how many books we thought might sell, added another three or four hundred and followed the advice of a local writer to bind 75% as hardcover and reserve the remaining 25% for softcovers, should there be demand later.   After months and months of work the books were finally ready. Dad and Michael drove to a trucking company in Fresno to retrieve the books in time for our book signing event. They were not allowed to peek until we had them at my studio. Together we opened a box, and when I got to the dedication page, I passed the book to Michael. He saw the drawing of himself on that page, along with Janey’s mom Florence, and he said, “Hunh. My hat is sitting kind of high on my head.” I responded, “That is because you were wearing it that way in the photo.”

 

Within a year or two all the hardcovers were sold. We had the remaining books bound as softcover and sold them for 1/2 as much. It took another 3-4 years to sell all of those, and now, if one gets lucky, The Cabins of Mineral King can be found on eBay or Amazon for around $100! 

During the years of art as a full-time business, I have needed help from time to time. When the studio was a public space, it took a tremendous amount of time for all the work of retail in addition to producing all the art.  Back then, notecards were a huge seller for me, and at one time I had about 30 different packages for sale. Once my husband said “ENOUGH” to being used as free labor, my parents would take cartons of cards home for packaging. Around 1998 or 1999, card sales began slipping as the internet started growing. This cut into sales, but it also lightened the physical, hands-on assembly-line type work. This year there are several events where cards are expected to sell well. Cards have continued to be a steady part of my business,  just in a smaller quantity than in the 80s and 90s. Suddenly I am realizing that there are many many unpackaged cards that need to be ready for the first event on November 22. This happens at the same time my commission customers are expecting their drawings! (I’m not even going to think about the paintings I’d like to have finished for these events. . . oh-oh, is that a twitch beginning under my left eye?) As I pondered the mystery of how to be 3 people at one time, my friend Nina said she’d love to help me! Oh my, what a blessing! Today we had the nicest time together in the studio: I drew and she packaged. You may have seen this before, but here are a couple of the cards she worked on:

The General Grant Tree is the Nation’s Christmas tree and is in Kings Canyon National Park. This image sells consistently, and I have reprinted it many times, in different sizes and even once using dark green ink. The Four Guardsmen don’t actually have a sign as you pass through them on the way up to Sequoia National Park. They are consistently beautiful and awe-inspiring, regardless of the time of day or the time of year. In reality, there is a small redwood tree somewhere near the middle of this scene, and I have chosen to omit it in the drawing. There is also a road sign with an arrow that didn’t seem to enhance the picture. . . and it is the artist’s prerogative to clean up the messiness of life!