Continuing along in our series on Art & Entrepreneurship, we’ll talk about several practical ways to actually monetize your creative works and earn some money from what you create.
Running a business and creating art are two separate but important issues creators and makers face.
The demands of creating make it easy for us to ignore the business side of your creative practice. Thus, making us creators, feel helpless and uninformed about what opportunities exist.
Luckily, I have taken the time to do the research for you on how to monetize your creative passion. This way, you have options to consider.
Often you’re burning through money purchasing supplies and expending all your energies on creating. I bet you don’t want to be left feeling exhausted, broke and unhappy. :-). Right?
So if you’re ready, let’s dig deeper into how to monetize your creative passion and get compensated for what you do.
Specific Ways to Monetize Your Creative Passion
- Selling Original Work: Selling your work is the most obvious option available to us. But when you decide to monetize your creative passion you’ll quickly notice that even here, there are several options available.
Some places we can sell our work include
- Open Studios, Trade and Craft Fairs, & Art Exhibitions
- Art Gallery Representation
- Personal Website
- Art Marketing Sites like Artful Home, Amazon Fine Art, Fine Art America
- Craft and Handmade Sites like Etsy
- Art Licensing: Just like art gallery representation, using art licensing to monetize your creative passion is a topic that requires a lot of knowledge to navigate its intricacies.
However, simply put, art licensing is about our intellectual property as artists. It involves giving someone permission to use your copyright to reproduce, distribute or otherwise use your creation under limited conditions.
There are various examples of that for the textile art, quilt and sewing industry. An example is VIDA design, which I explained over here in this post. Basically, they print your artwork on scarves, pocket squares, totes etc. Other places will create prints of your original work onto different substrates for sale. Examples are:
Alternatively, you could have these places make prints for you to sell yourself.
3 More Ways to Monetize Your Creative Passion
- Building Authority: An option to monetize your creative passion that hasn’t been widely explored by creative types is building authority. Doing this involves writing, publishing & selling books. It also involves doing speaking gigs and presentations for groups of people.
This option requires a lot of investment in time and may be the reason why it’s not explored more often.
- Teaching Workshops: Teaching workshops is a good option for textile and quilt artists and all creative types. It’s not only an option for you to monetize your creative passion, but also a source of energy, especially in person-to-person workshops. Includes:
- In-Person Group Workshops
- One-on-One Coaching Sessions
- Teaching Online Courses
- Selling Patterns & Kits: Another viable option to monetize your creative passion is to make it easy for others to create similar things to what you create.
Doing this involves documenting your process step-by-step and then creating a blueprint or pattern so that someone else can recreate what you do.
You can take this further by providing the supplies that are needed when someone is using your pattern. That’s when it’s said that you’re providing kits for customers to use to create your designs.
2 Final Methods to Monetize Your Creative Passion
- Commissions: Accepting commissions as a way to monetize your creative passion involves accepting custom orders to make things for other people for a premium fee.
Typically, your orders for commissions will come from individuals, public and state organizations and from corporations.
- Designing Fabrics: Finally, an option that has become within the reach of many makers and creators, because is the ability to design your own fabrics. Designing fabrics to monetize your passion is something more people are getting into in recent years because of the internet. Here are online sites which make this possible for the ordinary person, without the need to go through the big-name fabric companies.
So now here you have it. Seven different ways to monetize your creative passion as a textile artist. I know that finding time to do the research is hard so I did that for you. But you still need to take action on the information, investigate for yourself, and decide which of these options to explore.
Finding time is hard but if you don’t make time to take action, then nothing happens. Take a careful look at the businesses of some of the successful artists you admire. You’ll notice that their businesses are made up of at least two of these income sources.
If you’re not satisfied with the status quo, then you need to take action. Explore the various options and discover which ones will work best for your personal situation.
I’m exploring my options. I hope you do too.
Your Turn
Have you explored any of these options? Which of them and what was your experience? Do you have any more to add to the list above? I can’t wait to read your comments.
Warmest Regards,
You may also be interested in the other parts in this series
1: Making the Decision to Monetize Your Creative Work
2: The Truth About Art and Creative Passion
3. The Secret to Maintaining Your Creative Focus
4. Seven Practical Ways for Textile Artists to Make Money
5. Art & Entrepreneurship – Interview with Melanie Brummer (1)
6. Art & Entrepreneurship – Interview with Melanie Brummer (2)
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The Untold Story of How Money Affects Your Creative Passion
“Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” ~ Andy Warhol
I’m certain you’ve heard the statement that making money from your passion kills the passion. How true is this?
Just like you, I’ve heard this statement bandied around many times. And I’ve taken it at face value without critically examining its merits and demerits.
As a result of this line of thinking, many of us creatives are torn between seeking out viable ways to monetize our creative works and sticking with just creating as a hobby.
But as I came to the end of writing part 1 of this series on Art + Entrepreneurship, the question came to my mind again. “Does money kill creative passion?”
So why don’t we critically consider this question now? First off, what is a passion?
“Passion is a strong feeling of enthusiasm or excitement for something or about doing something”
So our original question can be reframed this way: Does money kill our strong feelings or enthusiasm about creating?
Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert’s cartoon, in a Wall Street Journal interview, explains that passion ebbs and flows because as our definition above has just shown, passion is about feelings.
For example, I heard a guy on the radio talking about how when his sons were younger, they got into different sports. And they’ll spend money buying expensive sports gear and uniforms only for his sons to lose interest and change their minds after a while.
I’m sure we all have similar life experiences which can make us relate to his sons. So one thing we can definitely say about our interests is this:
Passion is not enduring and therefore cannot be relied on.
Does Money Kill Creative Passion?
The truth is whether you make money or not, your passion for whatever it is you create, may come and go as it pleases.
There are several reasons why we lose interest in something. Scott Adams argues that failure is something that kills your passion.
The [projects] that didn’t work out – which was most of them – slowly drained my passion as they failed. The few that worked became exciting as they succeeded.
The easiest way for your passion be drained is therefore not by making money from it but to repeatedly fail at doing that thing. I find this quite interesting because it means passion does not guarantee success. Success, on the other hand, can fuel your passion.
Scott Adams puts it this way,
In hindsight, it looks as if the projects that I was most passionate about were also the ones that worked. But objectively, my passion level moved with my success.
He goes on to say:
Success caused passion more than passion caused success.
Put that way, it sounds jarring to the senses but I happen to agree with Adams. However, I approach this concept quite differently.
I call my concept, “the gift of progress” which I explain in this blog post. The summary of my concept is this. Making progress (or success if you will) motivates you, it fuels your passion for doing more and makes you accomplish bigger tasks.
Money does not kill passion otherwise, we’ll not have superstars. But failure can.
The Bigger Question About Money and Creative Passion
Having said all this, I think the bigger question we’re trying to answer is not whether money kills passion. It’s “how do we find meaning or fulfillment in our lives”?
We’ve somehow tied having a meaningful life to our passions. So it’s not surprising anything that appears to be a threat to our passion gets us all anxious about losing our life’s meaning.
The founder, Benjamin Todd, of 80,000 hours ( FYI: that’s the total number of hours you’ll work in your lifetime), believes we’ve got the order all wrong.
In a TED talk, Todd explains that we think our interests/passion matter more than they do because we underestimate how much they change.
Adams agrees:
“For most people, it’s easy to be passionate about things that are working out, and that distorts our impression of the importance of passion. “
The current order we follow in deciding on our life careers is this:
Todd argues that finding a fulfilling career does not start with following your passion. Rather, true meaning in life is found when you master a skill and use it not for only yourself but for the good of others.
Answering The Question About Money and Creative Passion
Dilbert creator Scott Adams and 80,000 hours founder, Benjamin Todd, are separated in age by probably a few decades. And while Adams speaks from a lifetime of experience, Todd speaks from a short youthful experience backed by loads of research, yet they both come to the same conclusion.
Passion is not what you focus on when you want to build a meaningful career. Start with skill/ mastery and working for the greater good.
Neither money nor passion give our lives meaning. It’s how our skills benefit others that gives us true meaning.
In conclusion, if you decide to monetize your creative work and turn it into a career (not a hobby), do what’s valuable.
That’s to say, focus on getting good at something you like that genuinely helps others. Then your success will fuel your passion and in turn, give your life meaning.
Part 4 of the series will be on “The Secret to Maintianing Your Creative Focus in a Commercial Environment”
Your Turn
What are your thoughts about money and creative passion? Does the fear of killing your creative passion stop you from going professional with your creative work? Do comment. I really want to hear your opinion.
Warmest Regards,
You may also be interested in other topics in this series:
1: Making the Decision to Monetize Your Creative Work
2: The Truth About Art and Creative Passion
3. The Secret to Maintaining Your Creative Focus
4. Seven Practical Ways for Textile Artists to Make Money
5. Art & Entrepreneurship – Interview with Melanie Brummer (1)
6. Art & Entrepreneurship – Interview with Melanie Brummer (2)