So how do you make any money off your art? Patreon is cute & all but I don't think it's enough for most creators.
No one's gonna spend 5 years writing a book if it's not protected.
In the pre-internet era, if you're an artist who produces physical art items (not books or music), you hustle at shows, fairs, exhibitions, if you can afford your own studio it helps, or you consign your work at craft shops.
I sold at craft fairs and consigned my items at several craft stores around town here, over a 12-year period. It takes a LOT of work and self-discipline to do this, because you have to think 6 months ahead. So much of it is seasonal, so I'd be working on Christmas decorations right after Mother's Day and back-to-school/autumn/Halloween stuff in February (I always took January off, both because of the crafting and typing schedules, which were insane in the fall; by January my brain was fried and my hands hurt from so much sewing and typing).
Consignment arrangements were frustrating because the percentage you have to pay the store could vary so much. I was part of a craft co-operative for some years in the '80s, and the fees ranged from 35% if you didn't have a paid membership and didn't work in the store a minimum number of days/month to 20% if you were a paid member, worked in the store, and were on the board of directors. I managed to hustle my way onto the board, paid my annual membership fee, and usually did more than the minimum number of days/month. At the same time I was consigning in other stores, and the trick was to not have the exact same items in more than one place, because everyone put the condition in that you couldn't undercut the prices at their place by selling it cheaper somewhere else.
So the average consignment fees ranged from 25-30%. One guy who was running a second-hand bookstore, when I pitched the idea of consigning my bookmarks and bookends there, informed me that he wanted a 60-40 deal where I got 40 and he got 60. I told him no, that I wouldn't take any deal that was more than 30. At 60, I'd be doing worse than giving them away, because the price would have had to be jacked up to far more than anyone would be willing to pay. He wouldn't budge, so that was that. I walked away.
That craft co-operative is gone now. We decided to stop when the GST came in, in 1990. We were running a physical store, so we would have had to collect and remit the tax and deal with the administrative part of that. The customers wouldn't have been happy, having to pay tax on our items. And given that there were 3 tiers of consignment fees, it would have been a nightmare to add GST into the calculations of what everyone got paid each month.
Along the way, I'd inherited the job of keeping the society's scrapbook - newspaper articles about our group, and anything else that documented our history. Since one of our members was fairly well-known in the community back then, and a couple of other well-known people in town would shop there, that scrapbook contained a bit of local history that wasn't only about us.
That's why, when I realized some years ago that I still had this scrapbook taking up room in my stuff over 20 years after we closed the store and most of the other board members had died, I decided to offer it as a donation to the Museum archives. They asked me to bring it in for evaluation and they'd let me know if they wanted to add it. Sure enough, awhile later they'd made their decision, and all they needed was my written consent as the donor of this material. So I went in, signed a few papers, and it was done.
I still sold at other stores and craft fairs and private commissions for years afterward. It was a harder hustle, though, not having a place where I could have more control over pricing and even what I sold.
Nowadays, of course, people can sell on Etsy, Artfire, Society6, deviantArt, or a hundred other sites, if they don't want to start an independent site. The other day I was looking into Society6, because what you're selling is the pattern, which people can order in a variety of formats - as a clock, blanket, art print, set of coasters, or whatever. You're not selling the physical item yourself, you don't even have to make it. For someone like me who would find it difficult at best to make regular trips to the post office to mail stuff out, this would be a much easier arrangement. Since it wouldn't be original needlepoint patterns that someone with patience and graph paper could reverse-engineer, I'm considering trying it. I'm nowhere near the artist my grandmother was, but I did produce a decent pencil crayon rendition of the view from the porch of our cabin on Okanagan Lake once. Lake, mountains, trees... that was 50 years ago, but I've still got pencil crayons, paper, a dozen photo albums for inspiration, and a good memory.
I just need a good idea for designs that would work for a variety of 3-D items, and to study the administrative angle. I've bought stuff from that company before, and they do turn out items of sturdy quality (yes, I bought an art print of penguins
). Rent and everything else is going up at an insane rate, so if this works, it would help a bit.
Anyway, that's musing out loud at this point. But at least I could try to sell my own original artwork. Writing fanfiction is a hobby that I can't legally sell. 3-D needlepoint started as a hobby but turned into a job.
