Are You Ready to Sell Your Art?

I’ve got good news and bad news.

The bad news first. Elizabeth Gilbert writes in her excellent book, Big Magic ( required reading for all creatives), that you should not ask your art to support you. I heartily agree.

 Imagine this. You’re, say, a song writer. You write a poem.  Then you write a melody.  You put the two together and after hours and hours, you develop a song.  Now you have this beautiful, haunting, song that vulnerably expresses your heart in the world… And now you want to go over to it, like a bully at recess, and demand “Give me all your money!”

 It’s sad.  It will make you sad, it will make your new beautiful song sad.  And it might make future songs that are considering visiting you NOT want to be written by you.  They might be like, “Mmmm, I don’t know, mom.  I’m not old enough to get a job.”

Because here’s some business 101: When you are trying to make money, you need to make what the people want, or you will not make money.  Basic math. Basic supply and demand. When you try to make art “on spec”, as they say, which just means to make art that you think someone will want to buy, it can really mess with your art and mess with your heart. It’s even possible you will be tempted to copy what someone else is successfully doing, and thus not be original and also be ethically douchey.

 It’s a big burden to ask your muse to provide you with cash money. This is especially true in early stages, when your art is like a little tiny seedling poking it’s adorable head above ground. Better to wait on a few tables and save a few bucks and live with roommates to cover the basic needs.

BUT here’s the good news. At some point, the work will be ready. How long, you ask? I don’t know. John Legend was probably not that fun to listen to one month after he started playing the piano. But after a while he became riveting. It is very possible to develop a living from your creative efforts. As it turns out, I currently make a decent living from my art. To be clear, for the first 2 decades of my art life, I did NOT make a decent living from my art. At all! Being an artist is very uncertain career plan. I had side jobs, I drove a crappy car, I lived cheap, I didn’t have cable. I carried on with my hippy life not because I thought anything would ever change and I’d get rich some day, but because I LOVED IT. I made sacrifices for it.

Over those years I did something very important: I got good at my art. I developed my voice. I figured out what I loved to make, which isn’t as easy as it sounds. I made A LOT of it. I made several bodies of work. I had failures. I had successes. I had some sales and some shows. Eventually, the hard work paid off and I was able to harness my years of creative training with some basic business awareness to create an actual living for myself and my family.

When you’re in the early stages of developing your art, it can be stressful and frustrating to put the added requirement that you can sell it. But you can ease into it when your work has progressed. Here is an important revelation that changed how I view art sales:

In order to make money as an artist, you need to expend the SAME amount of creativity in building in your creative business that you use to actually create your art.  

When you are just starting as an artist, it’s a little too much to also be marketing and selling. In the corporate world, there are different departments: R&D—Research and Development— and Sales are two important ones. THEY ARE DIFFERENT DEPARTMENTS. The people in those departments have different skill sets. And, newsflash, you have to do the R & D before you do the sales. Later you can also add Marketing, Finance, Supply Chain, and Janitorial.

And I want to help you. I know I’ve just spent some time trying to convince you that you shouldn’t try to sell your art. But if you are the person who’s invested time in developing your craft and your voice, and you have a body of work (or multiples), you may be ready for adding those different departments to your workflow. I’ve been doing this for a while and I’ve figured a few things out that can help you. If you are in that world of trading your art for dollars, please check out my free training, The Five Pillars to Sell Your Art Online. It breaks down the exact steps you need to turn your art into money… as soon as it’s ready to be sold…!