Book Review: Real Artists Don't Starve

It's a little hard for me to review this book because it's a little too familiar. As I've worked on writing over the past few years, I've collected stories about original artists and how they made their art (Neil Gaiman's 8 Rules for Writing are still stuck next to my computer). I read about the Inklings and Jim Henson, and Van Gogh and Michelangelo. In this book, I see many of those same stories collected and put together in an engaging, easy-to-read package, and I'm glad to see how much I've forgotten. Goins also adds some other stories I hadn't heard before, especially from the music business. One of the problems with a book like this is that ultimately it's a lot of things that worked for other people, and the exact same thing is never going to work for you. But as far as mildly myth-busting books go, this is a good one. Artists need patrons, and marketing isn't an inherently bad thing. This book is a welcome collection of reminders of those things we should already know but have somehow forgotten.