njt/indiebiz

Independent Artist's Guide to Business

The Independent Artist's Guide to 21st Century Business

You're making art. You want to make more art. This means you need to eat and live somewhere, and (depending on your art) materials.

You have three choices.

1. Avoid the subject of money entirely. Live with your parents or tolerant partners, eat out of garbage cans, give your art away.

2. Make your money somewhere else and keep your art pure. (aka, "Don't give up your day job.")

3. Make money with your art.

Artists through history have made these choices. None guarantees financial independence (the artists starving in Parisian garrets would have sold their art, had they been able to) but the third option gives you the most control over your life.

Let's assume, because you're reading this, that you want to understand how your art might enable you to create more art.

What is Art?

For our purposes, art is something you like to do and which other people (your fans) might like to experience. Some art is performance, such as dance or music or poetry recital; some art is product, such as a recording or novel.

Patronage

The two phases of art are:

1. Artist creates art.

2. Audience enjoys art.

Patronage is when you, the artist, are paid to create art. Sometimes this is a commission (in which case the person who pays you now owns the work), but in both cases you're being paid to produce art.

Patronage and commissions are enticing because you get money without having to sell anything. You are, actually, selling your time. But it's not your art that has a price tag. This is comforting for artists who feel uncomfortable about money: it feels like the work is valued without the moral taint of a direct commercial transaction.

TODO

• build an audience

• take names at gigs

• stay in touch via email and FB

• talk about the act of creation as well as upcoming performances

• give fans multiple ways to pay you.

• be recommendable

• learn to ask

• spin out products from your art (paintings to t-shirts, compositions to albums, poems to prints, etc.)

• be visible

• be reliable

• tools (patreon, etc.)