Aspiring artists are uncertain about how their work's quality will be evaluated by gatekeepers on artistic markets. Learning to evaluate the quality of one's work and its prospects on the artistic market is central to artistic careers, yet often overlooked in research. An analysis of 47 interviews with aspiring writers in Sweden shows that they use what in this article is coined appraisal devices to deal with this market uncertainty. Appraisal devices offer trusted and knowledgeable appraisals of their work's chances of success and failure on the artistic market. Appraisals from assessors become appraisal devices when assessors are trusted and seen as knowledgeable about how works are evaluated on the artistic market and are able to produce such evaluations. Appraisals from competitions become appraisal devices when the writer sees the evaluation as reflecting how the writer's work will be evaluated on the artistic market. In contrast to judgment devices, which take the perspective of cultural consumption, appraisal devices take the perspective of cultural production. Aspiring artists use appraisal devices to deal with the uncertainty of their chances of success on the artistic market.
Included in the definition of being an aspiring person is the risk of failure. Aspiring fiction writers are no exception. This article shows that the role of aspiring fiction writer involves managing three issues: the hope of being published, rejection by a publisher, and the perception of the rejection as a failure. Drawing on 47 interviews with fiction writers who have attempted to become first-time writers, the analysis shows that aspiring writers’ responses to rejection are related to accepting and dismissing responsibility for having failed and admitting or dismissing the rejection as a perceived failure. Based on these findings, the article presents procedures associated with four main approaches to dealing with failure: conceding, excusing, justifying, and refusing. This conceptual framework for understanding failure contributes to a theoretical understanding of evaluation and valuation processes and their consequences and to empirical studies of rejection as career failure; it also systematizes and extends Goffmans work on cooling out strategies.
A do-it-yourself culture and amateur production are significant features of creative industries. Selfpublishing is an eloquent expression of these features. Self-publishers invest in and make decisions to publish their creative goods without the involvement of an established and external production company or publishing house. In creative industries, claims are made about the inferior quality of self-published works, creating a stigma for self-publishing. This article investigates the ways in which aspiring writers who are considering self-publishing as an option to publish, handle the tension between their aspiration to publish a book and the possible stigma of self-publishing. The study draws on an analysis of interviews with 59 writers who are considering self-publishing as an option or who have self-published a book. The aspiring writers are aware of the subordinate status of such publications and while some avoid self-publishing, others seek ways to establish and legitimise the quality of their work to avoid the stigma. Legitimisation is produced through the perception of a transitioning author role and by shifting the basis of evaluation of publishability to the consumer side in creative industries, to non-professional judgement, and to the experience of being published. The outcome of the decision to self-publish, and the underpinning culture for making such assessments, has consequences for how books and other cultural goods are currently produced and the type of cultural goods that reach consumers. The assessment of self-publishing as an option among writers exposes tensions and transformations in the evaluation of cultural goods in contemporary creative industries.
Gatekeeping appears central to creative industries. To better understand gatekeeping, this article introduces a distinction between discovering and justifying the selection of cultural goods. Most research deals with legitimation and justifications for selecting cultural goods. This article draws on American pragmatism to elucidate gatekeepers' discovery of cultural goods under conditions of uncertainty and abundance. The article focuses on the discovery of publishable unsolicited manuscripts. Publishers learn to act upon particular kinds of experiences associated with publishable manuscripts. Gatekeepers learn to abandon preformed ideas of what to look for and instead use either an aesthetic or an efferent reading strategy. In aesthetic reading, a reading flow experience becomes the means to discover manuscripts. Through efferent reading, gatekeepers identify manuscripts as participating in a literary convention and view them either as exceptional within that convention or as adding something to the convention. The qualities of these experiences create the realization of a publishable manuscript; acting on this realization moves the process to the next phase, in which gatekeepers make justifications for selecting or rejecting the manuscript. Gatekeepers discover cultural goods when they have been professionalized and sensitized to produce the "right" type of experiences and creatively act on the qualities of these experiences.
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