One of an artist’s biggest challenges is determining how to make a living off of their work. To help, we’ve made this top 5 list of the most common (and also most useful) ways to make a living in the creative field. Let’s get into it!
Freelancing is probably the single most common way for an artist to break into an income, and it’s easy to see why. Outside of getting hired for a creative job, it is a (relatively) easy way to find work and build up a portfolio, thus leading to better projects and more returns. The main downside of commission work is that it restricts one's creative independence by causing you to focus on the projects of others. For some people, spending a few hours a week away from their main project to focus on a client’s seems like a good trade-off, but for others it may be a disadvantage to consider.
Strengths: Most stable route to income, easiest to grow
Weaknesses: Heavily constraints creative freedom
One of the classic ways for creatives to make cash has been in transactions, either for purely support (donations) or via some sort of print/book/music shop. These work well as a way to purely focus on freedom – the only problem with them is that they’re very hard to build momentum on, assuming that you have not used one of the other four methods first. They also suffer from high volatility, meaning that some months you may have very high income whereas other months it might be very low. Not for the risk-averse!
Strengths: Most room for creativity
Weaknesses: Hardest to build up, lacks stability
As internet software began to develop in capacity, services like Patreon came out to solve the problem of volatility caused by donation or ecommerce monetization. These services used “SaaS”, a form of revenue brought on by other software businesses to have customers subscribe to the service on a regular basis in order to access features. These membership services work with creatives too – subscribers can gain exclusive content and services, as long as they say subscribed to the system. This provides an incentive for the customer to stay consistent, and thus keeps income stable. The one problem with membership services (in addition to “hard to build momentum” challenge that still exists here) is that building out a solid membership service often requires some level of business acumen, managing things like economic value and churn.
Strengths: Retains creative freedom while keeping income stable
Weaknesses: Requires strong business/marketing acumen to build, harder to get people to subscribe than to donate
The old-school way of getting money to do what you love is easy: ask people for it. Publishers in all mediums and specialties are out there, looking for new products that will potentially make them money. If you can pitch how your idea will get them that money, then they’ll give you the funds to go out and make it. This doesn’t have to be a big corporate firm, either – getting public funds via websites like Indiegogo or Kickstarter also counts as publishing.
However, like donations, publishing also suffers from the “momentum” problem. Publishers like as certain of bets as they can get. Unless you’re very persuasive, they likely won’t bite on your idea unless you already have a few wins under your belt. But how do you get wins if you have no money? Hence the “Catch-22” problem of publishing.
Strengths: Largest amount of money, highest potential for “production value”
Weaknesses: Hard to persuade (especially for newcomers), often comes with IP/creativity constraints
Rounding off our list, we have some sort of training/consulting program. These are easy to make if you are even moderately good at an art form, and they tend to have a lot of demand because it's easy to prove their economic value.
The one downside to training/consulting is that it often takes a lot of time, time that can distract from purely creative endeavors. It’s also hard to identify as “X the artist” if everyone sees you as “X the consultant” or “X the teacher”. These stereotypes aren’t impossible to get rid of, but its a good thing to keep in mind!
Strengths: Large stable income and demand
Weaknesses: Distracts from creative endeavors
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Anyway, that rounds up this list of ways to make money on your art – we hope it was helpful! If you wish to learn more, you may be interested in joining our Discord community.
