How to Make a Living as An Artist
Thoughts from Author Deryn Collier
Aunt Jackie is a free and paid newsletter. If you find yourself reading it regularly and you enjoy it and find it valuable, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. This gives you full access and it helps me make a living as an artist.
Dear Readers,
As a self employed single artist who has no familial wealth I’m continually worried about making ends meet and am endlessly curious how others get by financially. I recently received an email from author Deryn Collier, who is a reader of this Substack, and who signed off the email with “I have filled my time since leaving my job in May with launching a book and a big fun cross-country trip and now am facing my creative work as though it were a yawning chasm. I think you might know the feeling. Today I almost registered for full time school in order to avoid it!”
In my reply I asked if she felt comfortable sharing with me how she has been managing financially since taking the leap to full time author. This is her reply.
Thanks for asking about how my re-entry into creative work has gone.
I took some time to thoroughly investigate going back to school. There is a new grant called StrongerBC Future Skills Grant and I was looking into applying that to some technical writing courses at SFU. In the end the grant for that course was over-subscribed, so I am on a wait list. I still might do it in future, if a seat comes available and the tuition were covered by the grant.
But once I’d looked into school, I also looked at what I have planned coming up - a whole lot of events for my new book where I am getting paid to speak and mentor - and decided that with what I can see coming in, I can give myself the grace of about 6 months without outside work. And then I’ll re-evaluate.
I’ve gotten back into the flow and am working on something new and completely different for me (a storytelling performance rather than a novel) and it is very scary but also new and fun. I will be performing this piece three times in October - so there is a clear deadline!
As for income, and balancing creative work, I have done many things over the years. I will say that I am very fortunate in that my partner has a very steady job that pays well, has benefits and a pension. And he has no desire to do anything creative or anything else with his time or career. So while I have almost always worked on top of my writing, it’s mostly been part time.
But I also have a very strong desire to be independent - what if something happened to my husband or his job? What if we split up? How would I support two little kids on my own? So I have almost always worked half time, so that I can support my creativity. I have seen it as buying my writing time. I see it is I support my creativity - it is only now, after almost 20 years, that I am trying out asking my creative work to support me.
In those 20 years I have done many things. Mostly I wrote for clients - did freelance communications writing - so writing web sites, corporate newsletters, media releases, etc etc. I also did a lot of marketing writing, which I found very soul-crushing after a while. But for a really long time, writing for money worked for me. I would charge a good consulting rate and earn what I needed in about 10-12 hours a week. I did that for 15 years.
When I think about writing that way, I think that I am serving my art - I am still writing, and I’m writing for a specific purpose, so that helps me get better at my craft. Plus I get paid, so it takes the pressure off of my creative work to make money for me. (For me, that has felt like too much pressure, and really scary. It’s no wonder you are struggling with that!)
Right now I am very burnt out from basically have two careers for almost 20 years. So am taking some time to regroup and offering some services to writers - editing, manuscript evaluations, that kind of thing - to see if this will be sufficient to fill the income gap.
But I would be very open to going into technical writing, as I have done that in some jobs and find that it is very precise and disciplined, and in the end serves me as a writer. So we’ll see what happens. I know for sure I can’t go back to doing marketing writing. I just don’t want to persuade anyone into anything - it feels inherently manipulative.
Oh, and the last 3 years until the spring I worked half time in an office helping people retrain for new employment, and find work that would allow them flexibility to practice their art without burning out. Many of my clients were artists who were grappling with these same questions around work. It felt like deep service to work with them through these questions to see if we could find a way for them to retrain into something that would allow them to work according to their abilities and support their art.
With them, we’d look for jobs that require less than one year of training (then the training can be paid for by the government) and that they could work part time or on call, preferably earning a union wage, but at something that is sustainable in terms of interactions with others. So, no social service, or helping professions. More like janitorial, food service, landscaping, that kind of thing.
In my experience the trick is in how you frame it. Sometimes the answer to money is just to go out and earn it in a very straightforward way.
So, that’s where I’m at. It’s a constant question.
As always, my quilts are available to purchase. I wrote this Substack about how sewing helps me process what’s happening to me, and shared some of my available quilts. Your purchases really help me survive as an artist. I also fully understand that not everyone is in the market for a quilt, or has the disposable income for one, or maybe simply doesn’t like them! I can’t emphasize enough how much it helps me when you re-stack one of my Substacks (especially one that features work I’m selling) or share it on any other social media.
On the heels of the above - I’m crowdfunding to raise money to continue to do my work with the women in the Mormon polygamous community of Bountiful. One of the people I photograph is heading to Utah to visit family and has invited me to go along. I’m trying to buy a plane ticket. I wrote about how much these women have changed me and helped me grown into the photographer I am. If you’re not into quilts but you’d like to support my work, you can send me an e-transfer or Paypal to divesin@gmail.com
