How I’m thinking about money
As a person who makes art.
To the person who wants to make a living making art,
I’m writing for the person with a day job or someone who finds themself with more time and is looking to design for themselves a lifestyle that involves trading ‘Art’ for money.
I think about this topic a lot and I’m finding a bit of ‘success’ after decades of experimenting and riding out mistakes.
I’m writing this as part of my collaboration with
, every month we have a topic that we contribute to respond to as a way of sharing knowledge. We also host a public Zoom session that is free to attend live. The next session is on the 6th of November, and we’ll be discussing the topic of money. (click the link to see localized time)What are we selling?
In a job, even a creative job, you are trading time for money.
This is the lowest value you can get for the thing you are selling. Having a job is part of the overall strategy. But as soon as you can trade up, I think it makes sense to do so.
The aim is to be independent of time constraints.
Here’s what I think we can sell instead:
A Point of view
Professionalism
Competence
Experience/Expertise
Product
When I get a job as an illustrator, what I’m selling is Competence and Professionalism. That’s all they are buying, publishing is a huge machine that needs to keep churning.
Depending on the job, I value add Point of View and Expertise, it may surprise you that these are not always desired or appreciated, but I try to add as much as it is welcomed, it is a team sport, and different projects require different ingredients.
The more my Point of View and Expertise produce successful outcomes, the more I can sell that as part of the value of hiring me and earning a premium for that.
When working within known fields such as publishing there is a market price of what you can expect to be paid for competence and professionalism.
It’s a wide range from $2500 to $25000 per book project.
In the beginning, the publishers are NOT looking for YOU in particular, they are looking for someone to do X, to get in on this money, figure out the X you can do with competence and professionalism, and then let them know about you.
(This is where I’m at, and my next step is to add a premium for my point of view and expertise as I start to prove the value of my contributions, via sales)
Point of View is ultimately your most valuable asset, once you can prove that people want it.
It’s Business
Two of the most successful cartoonists have business degrees.1
The value of art is unlocked by business people.
If you want to get value out of your art, you need to think of it as a business.
You need capital to invest in yourself and ride through quiet times. Or a job while you side hustle. It’s probably easier to just run a business than to run an art business around your talent.
You need to be so audacious to believe your ‘talent’ is deserving of the infrastructure it’s going to take to run it. And that you can both manage your talent and your business.
You can build that audacity by starting small and gaining confidence.
That means, keep your job if you have one, or get a job ideally part-time, and and start investing the rest of your time into yourself.
Experiment and explore different ways to make money. But understand, that no one is going to give you a living wage to do what you love. You have to figure out how to do that. And it’s probably going to take time.
Thinking of yourself as a business means your customers pay your business and your business pays you. You have to make enough money to cover all the cost of running your business and paying yourself whatever wage you want, that is the game.
Naiveté
I want to quit my day job and do X, this is the dream we are sold.
That is oversimplified and not really a good dream. As a person who makes art, you have various valuable traits that you could sell for money, again:
A Point of view
Professionalism
Competence
Experience/Expertise
Product
I observe that practicing Artists sell a combination of these things in various forms.
I believe they do this to diversify. But also because the skills help each other.
For example, I sell my point of view as a subscription to Substack. But this is only valuable because of how I’m able to sell my competence and professionalism to very desirable clients.
Writing a substack helps potential clients decide to hire me because I’m demonstrating all the traits here.
One day my Point of View will be able to generate enough income that I can limit the client work that I do, and even turn it into products. The goal I put to you is instead of betting on a particular creative career, understand the valuable traits you can possess and develop and understand that they have general value.
Run your business in a way to capitalize on the various demands on your traits at the right times, and invest in developing all the traits.
So that you can have the business that you want, that supports the life that you want. And don’t do this backward.
Assignment:
Here’s a Journal Question - ‘What do I want to trade for money in 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, and what investments can I make daily to allow me to do that, ps: the wrong answer is time’
Sign up for ILLOGUILD Talks Money, to hear the thoughts of illustrators, authors and entrepreneurs in the early stages of our journey. It’s free.
PS, if you’d like to chat:
Book a meeting with Adam Ming
Jim Davis and Scott Adams
You just hit all the right chords Adam. I believe that if we don't monetize our work or don't work towards it.. then we gotto work on stuff we don't enjoy to keep us alive and pay our bills. And if we are paid for what we love then we don't have to do stuff we don't enjoy as much. Just my point of view.
This is so helpful! So often I hear the opposite, why does someone need to monetize their side hustle or seek to make money creating? It’s almost a shame trigger for those who have audacity to consider pursuing investment in self for a creative career. Grateful for your practical advice here!