Mindset

You will not starve

Be an artist, you won't starve. — Photo by Kon Karampelas on Unsplash

I watched Brandon Sanderson‘s keynote speech “Ten Things I Wish I’d Known as a Teen Author” and one thing stuck with me. When he was young people discouraged him from becoming a writer, they thought he would be unemployed. They told him that it was a one in a million chance.

It’s the same with artists!

When I was a kid my grandma told me that I should become a teacher because it’s’ a safe profession. No one took drawing seriously and people told me it was a waste of time. Maybe because in their mind they have this picture of a lonely artist making one painting after another and then trying to sell them on the street, and failing, and then dying poor and unknown.

It’s so at odds with what it’s really like to be an artist.

There are now hundreds of opportunities. Sure you can paint oil paintings, but artists are also sought after to illustrate books, design covers, work on video games and movies, make fabric patterns, design art for clothes, household items, tattoos, posters, greeting cards, and hundreds of other things.

Brandon wished someone had told him that being a writer was a viable job choice. I wish I had found out sooner that being an artist is a completely fine job. Only by, sort of, an accident, I found out you can earn money by drawing things and printing them on t-shirts.

Will this post be useful to anyone? Maybe an aspiring artist reads this and it will be a counterpoint to the people in their life insisting that they choose a safer job.

Designers give up on passive income

Passive income from digital designs — Photo by Cristofer Jeschke on Unsplash

Two years ago I talked to a fellow designer. She told me that she opened her store on one of the websites where you can sell your art. If I remember correctly, it was Society6. But she stopped uploading her art there and I think she might have even closed her store. She said that she didn’t get any sales and that she mostly earns her money by doing freelance work.

Which is all good — you definitely can earn your living like that. Designers are very needed now, it seems everyone has a project that they need designers for: to design websites, apps, marketing materials, infographics. The problem is that if you earn money for freelance work, you only earn when you work. So there’s a limit to how much you can earn and it’s defined by how much time you have for work.

You probably don’t want to spend all your time working.

That’s why it’s so important to find other income sources. And one of them is earning passive income from your designs.

The easiest way to do that is to upload your designs to one of the websites that will sell your art and you won’t have to spend any more time on that. You will simply get paid royalties every month.

In the beginning, my royalties were $2 or $3 a month. So I get it, it’s easy to get discouraged and stop publishing your art. Or even to close your store as my friend did. I told her that a significant part of my income comes from Society6, TeePublic, Redbubble, Threadless, and convinced her to give it another try.

When you upload your designs to Society6 or anywhere else you might not get any sales at first. Just wait. And upload more art. If you keep at it, it’s only a matter of time until you get your first sale.

No sales? Read this.

I belong to a few Facebook groups for designers and there’s one topic that keeps coming up, though it’s usually asked in various ways:

“No one buys my designs. Am I doing something wrong?”
“How to get customers?”
“I uploaded 5 designs already and no sales! Why?”
“Is it even possible to sell anything? Does anyone earn any money?”

I already answered that last question, but now it’s time to address the general issue here.

This is how it looks in the beginning: you make a design and publish it, then you make another and publish it too. Then maybe you make a few more. And then you wait for sales. But not only does no one buy anything, no one even sees your designs, they don’t show up in search results. You try to promote them, you post on Twitter or Facebook and you get no feedback, no likes.

At that moment we can divide designers into two groups:

Designers who get discouraged and upset and give up.
Designers who keep creating and publishing regardless of how their designs are doing.

There is only one key to success here. Ok, yes, there are a few important things that will impact how successful your store will be and whether you make money: you need to create something people will want to buy, you need to make your designs possible to find, and finally you need to put effort into marketing.

But there’s one thing that is more important than all that. Consistency. Yes, consistency is key. If you want to have a successful store on Threadless, Teepublic, or anywhere else, then you have to make a lot of, and I mean A LOT, of designs.

It’s not enough to make a few designs and hope someone will buy them. And you definitely should not complain about lack of sales just yet. First make sure that you:

Have at least 30 designs uploaded. Better yet — 50. I have over 130 in my store.
Add new designs consistently. Try to make a new design every few days or, if possible — every day.
Make sure all your designs have tags. I add 10 tags to each.

Only after you fulfill these conditions and there are still no sales you might start to worry and you might be entitled to a little complaining. But it’s a very unlikely scenario because consistently creating new designs will result in 2 things:

you will have a lot of designs in your store and a much higher chance that someone will see something they like and buy it,
after making a lot of designs you will improve. This is actually the only way to improve your design skill — make a lot of designs. So even if your designs are quite bad at first and, understandably, no one wants them, then it’s even more important for you to make designs. You will be much, much better after another 50 designs.

It’s very difficult to do something for a long time and not improve. To be successful, be consistent.

Step out of your comfort zone

I was thinking about my first two jobs and that it was a good thing that they were just a bit too uncomfortable and forced me to find something else. Nowadays I like stepping outside of my comfort zone. That’s why I make games and why I started this blog. But back then I don’t know if I would have been brave enough to leave comfortable employment without an external push.

A few weeks ago I took a Self-Couching course and in one of the reading materials was a sentence which I liked:

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.”
Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

My Grandma

Two days ago, my grandma had trouble breathing and was feeling tired. My mom measured her blood pressure which was too high and then called a doctor at a local public clinic, described the symptoms, and told the doctor that she gave my grandma Nebilet to lower the blood pressure.

The doctor consulted my grandma’s file.

“I have not prescribed Nebilet,” – the doctor said. – “If your mother dies, it will be your fault.”

She refused to come over and examine my grandma.

In theory, public health care is free and generally available in Poland, as nearly everyone pays a mandatory health care fee. But in practice, you have to wait a long time to schedule a visit, often times a year or two even. So, we pay for private doctors when we can’t wait and Nebilet was prescribed by a private doctor, so that’s why it was not in the public clinic’s file.

This is only partially a story about my grandma, though. The second part is that after the call with the doctor, my mom was very upset and cried, and was furious with the doctor who refused to see my grandmother. She was distraught all day and even when she told me the story the next day, she could not tell it calmly. Most of all, she was angry at herself that she can get emotional and lets other people get to her.

This is a good start — noticing that we get overwhelmed by our emotions and wanting to learn to manage them. Most people don’t even get to that part. I, too, was like that.

Here are 2 main things that helped me:

Writing down all the emotions, in detail. And dissecting them into even more atomic emotions. I have hundreds of pages of notes written after upsetting events or conversations. I kept writing everything that came to my mind and analyzing what made me feel that way.
Realizing that I am responsible for my feelings – Accepting this made all the difference. The fact that someone made me angry is not their fault. It’s my fault for letting that emotion impact me that much. Once you realize that anger and other negative emotions only live in your mind, you get to decide what you do with them.

My grandma’s feeling better now. She’s only 94 years old, which, in her family, would be a bit early to die.

Pottery Class Story

The story goes like this: in a pottery class students were divided into two groups. Students in the first group were asked to make a perfect pot. Students in the second one were asked to make as many pots as they could. When all pots were compared it turned out that all the best pots were from the second group.

The story about a pottery class is from “Art and Fear” by David Bayles which I haven’t yet read. I’ve first stumbled upon it here.

I like it a lot because it takes the pressure off. I don’t have to create that one perfect drawing. It’s better to draw as much as I can without obsessing over a single drawing. I don’t need to write a perfect blog post either — the more I write the better I will get at it.

Mindset

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