So, happy Black Friday, everybody. I’ll be spending today on a couch, writing, thanks. Let me know when it’s safe to leave the house.
In the meantime, let’s take a moment to briefly touch on one of my favorite topics: the practice of business and how it relates to the practice of being a creative type. More specifically…how do I turn my (drawings / sculptures / photos / prose / poems / rants, circle all that apply) into a paycheck?
Broadly speaking, I like to give a three-part answer to this question. It’s a little like a flowchart:
1) Are you willing to whore yourself out?
If you are, get used to the idea that you’ll be practicing your craft as a skill set, not as a personal expression. Basically, this kind of thing is what people get Commercial Art degrees for. You spend your days doing art, but it’s usually someone else’s idea you’re making into reality. The work is more production-oriented, and some of it can be downright mundane and tedious. It’s a great way to collect a paycheck, but understand that at the end of the day you’ll likely have little energy for your own creative output. A chef once put this idea in a nutshell for me – he spends all day making food, so when he goes home, he eats fast food or TV dinners to avoid any more cooking.
That’s not to say that creative types with creative industry day jobs never do their own thing after hours or on the weekend. Just don’t expect to have an infinite desire to draw/paint/write/whatever. Even if you love doing it, producing work eight hours a day does eventually wear down your ability to come home and look at doing the same thing another four to six hours a day with no guarantee of additional pay. You come home from that design job, and you probably don’t want to boot up Illustrator or InDesign for recreation. You’ll probably end up spending time you could be working on your own projects doing things like having a social life, playing video games, watching movies, going on dates, or even – gasp – sleeping. This isn’t really a bad thing, but it means your personal projects can take longer to complete.
The trick to making this approach work is to land a creative job that will let you do the kind of work you want, even if the specific projects aren’t your babies. Find a company that does work that you admire – the kind of thing you’d like to see in your own portfolio in a couple years. Do your best to land a job there.
If this won’t work for you…
2) Are you willing to put in lots and lots and lots of work?
This can be described as the “bootstrapping” method, and it’s the tried-and-true approach of choice for most creative types. It consists of two steps. First, find a day (or night) job that uses the least of your creative juices while still being something you can stand to do every day, and that will provide an adequate paycheck. Second, do your own thing on the side as much as you can stand. Oh, and get used to sleep being something other people do.
This approach requires some entrepreneurial spirit, because the long-term goal is to make your creative “side job” profitable enough to live off of, and becoming your own boss.
…I can hear you recoiling in shock. Through the Internet, no less. Stick with me, though.
Business?!? But I’m an artist!
If you’re following the ad nauseam online debate between print and web cartoonists you’ve heard something along these lines, where the web cartoonists tend to advocate a be-your-own-boss entrepreneurial approach, and the syndicated print cartoonists advocate relying on the syndicates or other business experts. They want to send out drawings and receive a paycheck for their well-executed ideas without having to muck about with the dingy mess that is business management, which in all fairness is not unreasonable.
Of course, the lines are not so clean as this and there are a lot of positions in between, and more overlap than either side usually admits to. Still, the debate persists.
What Sort of Work, Exactly?
Where countless idealistic young creatives fall down is expecting to be “discovered.” The idea goes like so: You’ll get a day job, spend your off hours honing your skills, and somehow manage to find a publisher/gallery/studio/whatever that will bring you fame and fortune merely for being so dang good. That’s just precious. It’s also a proven road to success…for a very, very lucky small percentage.
Basically, if you’re willing to live with the long odds of being “discovered” and rocketed to stardom by some third party who will mediate between you and your audience (while taking a generous cut of the profits) then you’ll be fine toiling in obscurity until your moment arrives. Assuming it does eventually arrive, that is. You can improve your chances of “discovery” by shopping your work around to places that handle similar work – if you make comics or write books, show your work to publishers – most have submittal guidelines for just such things. Painters and other studio artists should build relationships with gallery owners.
But understand that you’ll be subject to the whims of editors or other gatekeepers, and that you’ll need to figure out whether you’re willing to pander if your pure creative vision doesn’t meet with immediate approval from the people you’re trying to sell it to. Because that’s just what you’re doing, and there’s a reason that “sell” is part of the expression “sell out.” If you want your work appreciated – especially financial appreciation – within your lifetime you may end up compromising rather than being a dreamy iconoclast.
More and more in the modern creative marketplace, there are a lot of people just like you looking for work, and only so much work that needs doing, so if you won’t do it the boss’s way he can find somebody who will for the same paycheck. The inverse corollary is this: if you’re willing to take control of the business side of your creative life, you get to keep more control over your creative vision without needing to dilute it to please anyone but yourself. Which is where the Internet comes in.
The Internet for Creatives
Not to sound too web-evangelistic, but the Internet is an unprecedented tool for creative types to find an audience suited to their style, combined with an anachronistic step back in time to the age of artistic patronage. If you’re producing work – especially purely creative work in areas like written fiction or art – then you can leverage the reach of the web to market your creative vision directly to people who will appreciate it without the interference of a gatekeeper. Some of those people will buy merchandise (art prints, apparel with your art on it, printed books, etc.) and others may simply donate a little money at a time to keep you working. Most will just look at your work and move on without paying a dime, but a large enough audience can guarantee that the small percentage who do pay you for your work will add up to a real, livable income and potentially a serious profit stream.
In the end, remember that creative types are first and foremost communicators, storytellers and idea-shapers. The web is the most powerful and pervasive communications platform history has ever seen, and it’s accessible without the huge up-front investment required to sell physical goods. That means it is accessible to anybody with the time and drive to make good use of it.
3) Can you rely on exploiting the kindness of strangers (or loved ones)?
When you’re not on your own, the equation changes somewhat. For instance, you can reduce the necessary hours spent at a day job by minimizing your expenses:
- Living in a shared apartment makes for lower rent and utilities.
- If you’re young enough to live with your family, you can sidestep the day job entirely and focus on your work.
- Living in an area with good public transit or bike accessibility means never having to pay for a car or auto insurance (or oil changes, or parking fees…the list goes on).
If you’re married and both partners work, you might orchestrate a shift from being employed to self-employed, with your partner’s income as a safety net during the transition. If you have enough total income to bank a year’s worth of expenses in advance, that will give you a full year before you even need to be bringing in significant new income.
Sketchup groups and artist collectives are great social resources for talking shop, learning from pros, sharing the expenses of buying and maintaining equipment, lowering studio rent, and keeping your creative juices flowing strong and steady.
For that matter, networking skills are a must for all creatives. Learn to use all the social channels you can, because you never know where an opportunity will come from.
So…what to do if all this sounds like too much work?
4) Poof! A Miracle Occurs!
You were born to create, and your entire life has led you where you need to be, when you need to be there. You’ve had the right opportunities, the right support network, the right education. Your natural talent is unparalleled. This is your destiny.
If that isn’t you, expect that creativity will always be a form of work. But keep in mind it’s work we love. During the long slogs, the late nights, the missed parties we skip to meet that deadline, it makes all the difference.
Further Reading:
In the vein of business for artists, three recent articles on various aspects of the topic:
- Matt Blind of rocketbomber.com discusses the concept of copying and the relationship between distribution of ideas and the ideas themselves, as well as who’s paying for it.
- One of Matt’s slightly older articles about the types of customer who look for books, and what they’re looking for in a book.
- Christopher Butcher (co-founder of TCAF) writes about whether or not the concept of an “all-ages” comic is even a real idea, or just a meaningless buzzword. This is more pertinent to the idea that businesses look at creatives in a certain way, with certain expectations, which may or may not work out in the end.