Artists Versus Authors

I've been thinking about this a lot lately...

Most of the authors I know enjoy writing for the sake of spinning an epic tale and, if they can get paid doing it, great. The majority of them simply want their stories to be enjoyed and shared. This is just my perception, of course, but I can only go off what I see. Authors, writers and poets usually just aren't in it for the money, and are somewhat okay with that.

Artists, however, are greedy bastards. Not all of them, mind you, but apparently, if you can draw, sketch, doodle, paint or slobber artistically, you think you're the next million-dollar artist who needs to be in galleries all over the world.

Never mind the fact that you're one of a million. No, not one IN a million, one OF a million, most likely all of whom live in the same state as you (or nearby enough to be a competitor). Artists are as bountiful as authors, but for some reason, the visually-oriented have some kind of notion that, because you can see it (you can't see words, motherfuckers?), you should pay more for it. They take away the effort of having to imagine what something is looking like.

Yes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Fantastic. Most authors will write a short story of five thousand words and get paid about five cents a word. That comes out to $250. Does that mean art should be worth more than $50 because it can describe a fifth of that? More, because it can remove the effort required to actually imagine something?

Is anyone taking into account the time it takes to create 5,000 words that are worth $.05 each, or the vast amount of publications that won't even talk to us because we're not writing what they deal with (science fiction is not fantasy, nor is it romance, and none of those are mysteries, romances, erotica or dramas). On top of that, being able to get published once doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be published again - unless you're consistently good, you're done. You've got to thrive to stay ahead of the game, and if you fall in with the rest of the pack, you're lost.

Artists, however, will always have people who will pay for something they've already done, and in the digital age, selling multiple prints of the same piece makes sales much easier. (Of course, digital books are on the rise, but the publicity of such is extremely difficult, and any aspiring author who goes the e-publishing route is going to discover that, unless they're willing to invest a LOT of time, effort and money into their own publicity, they're not going to get recognized and end up with a book nobody buys.) Art does not suffer from that limitation - they can put a single piece up and "sell" it for multiple people to use for ten, twenty, fifty or a hundred dollars or more.

Was there ever a time that an author could approach an artist and ask to use their art in a book that will give them publicity and just be happy with the fact their craft has earned them recognition?

Any artists who read this that I know personally may be an exception to this. If you are, I apologize. If not, ask me how much I give a shit and how much money I'm NOT going to give you for a piece that took less time and effort than I put into a single chapter.

EDIT: I want to clarify something. I do mean AUTHORS. Releasing a 50-page book of prose only partially counts, and if you've never finished that single manuscript you've been working on for a decade, you're excluded from being part of the "author" community. Go back to writing fan-fic about Harry Potter, Twilight or Pokemon. Also, fan-fic writers don't count at all. Get your own god damn intellectual property.