The Space to Create
on financing art and freedom.
This piece is a bit of a “yes, and…” to two linked pieces my friend
wrote last week. The first, Quid Pro No Thank You, responded to the question: when we put work out in to the world, what does our audience owe us?In her follow up piece, she breaks down her own approach to a livelihood structure that provides her editorial freedom, answering the question:
How the hell do you make any money if you're not writing content with the intent to attract and convert buyers?
In the comments on Tara’s original piece,
wrote:I want to live in a world where I create for the love of it. [Ed note: me too!] Practical economic realities mean I have less time to create for free when not many people buy, even though I enjoy it and I do feel it helps people. It's something of a vicious cycle.
In those comments, I said something to the effect that in my artist identity, the question of what someone owes me feels ridiculous…which is interesting. Why is that not the concern of an artist?
So I wanted to both speak to my own livelihood and creative structures— as another example of a structure that genuinely provides space to create free from marketing/sales constraints— and then ultimately dive further into the messy conversation about how we exist and support ourselves as creatives and artists in this economy:
How do we create a world where we are free to create for the love of it?
All these years, and you don’t have thousands of subscribers?!?
Tara naturally did a perfect job explaining the distinction of finding clients vs building an audience, and I cosign everything she wrote:
The problem is that online marketers have conflated "building an audience" with "finding clients" for the last decade or so. Those activities are not the same. The accepted "wisdom" of online marketing is that building an audience and finding clients (or customers) are one and the same—make content, build audience, sell, buy a Lambo.
It’s not that building an audience to eventually get some customers doesn’t work. It’s that there are far faster, less energy-intensive ways to find customers.
I’ve been at ::gestures at business stuff:: for over a dozen years, and my email list is creeping on 700 people. And that’s with a lot of move-to-Substack growth!
You could certainly infer that I’m preternaturally bad at the marketing tricks of the trade. But the real story of that relatively small audience-to-business-age ratio is that I’ve never put much effort into audience growth. I haven’t needed to! Wanderwell provides super high touch bookkeeping and business advisory services. We only need a small number of new clients a year, and so scale isn’t even all that helpful of a leverage point to chase1.
As
elegantly summed it up,Services can thrive in low-traffic environments.
While we for sure receive inquiries from folks that came through my writing and speaking mostly clients come through word of mouth and referrals2.
So what I have put a tremendous amount of effort into is ecosystem building. We’ve never really had a sales pipeline problem. There’s nothing magic about that fact, but it is the result of years of consistent relationship cultivation and tending.
So if you need any kind of assurance that you can ignore social media, never publish on a consistent schedule, never have a newsletter freebie or a funnel, etc… I am here to provide abundant assurance.
The Concerns of Artists
My primary identity is artist, and it has been as far as I can remember. I have other identities— writer, business leader and advisor, etc… — that touch my livelihood work more directly, but artist has always been my core identity. It’s what I studied in college and it’s been the primary lens through which I see the world.
Even so, much of my own creative output happens outside of any kind of market and without talking about it all that much.
An example: I’ve been working on an edition of artist books this year— a collection of moss poems, if you must know— I recently showed the first finished copy to a friend and they urged me to try and sell them through a local gallery. And…I am absolutely not going to do that. While bookmaking has been one of my primary art forms for decades (one of my pieces lives in the collection of a major contemporary art museum), nowadays I only gift my work to friends.
To be clear: there’s nothing wrong with selling art work! And yet, I’ve always known that, for myself, making a living from my art would only feel like a burden; it’s more satisfying for me to keep my work in the realm of the gift.
Now, much of my writing and thinking work in the world, which I also consider creative, is in relationship to my paid work in the world. This writing is certainly connected to Wanderwell! But you’ll rarely see me make any sort of sales pitch.
I can be a wily one: I don’t work with deadlines and have run a business for over a dozen years without ever once having a publication schedule or a content calendar. I am a tremendously slow writer! Sometimes I need to leave a piece marinating in the background for weeks before it feels complete and ready for the world.
None of these peculiarities are particularly well suited for content marketing as a core business development strategy, and so, instead of forcing myself into the conventional wisdom, I’ve crafted a business that suits and supports my own (wily, artist) nature.
How do we finance creative space?
In Tara’s comments there was a point about about having a “money business” (in this example, web development) separate from creative identity and output. Super common, yes?3
Though not always satisfactory in the time/money/space equation. That sort of set up doesn’t necessarily give you the leverage of time and space when you are still the person performing the work and delivering the service.
In Tara and my case, the important structural piece that provides space to create is that podcast production (for Tara) and bookkeeping services (for me) are both largely delivered by people that are not us. We still work in these lines of business, but the actual delivery doesn’t require either of us.
In case it’s not clear, bookkeeping was never something I thought about, dreamed about doing when I growing up. Wanderwell started a bookkeeping service because in the early years we were doing a lot of business planning for capital raises and our clients had unusable financials because their books were a mess. We knew we could do it better than the not-great options out there4.
There were moments some time back where I really thought about giving it up. But apart from a belief in the excellent service we offer, the primary thing that kept me from folding it is knowing that my work in the world would suffer if I shifted to a model of generating all the revenue myself through advisory services.
For me, the pressure to make a sale or complete a transaction from my research, my writing, my creative output tends to shut my flow down.
Business as Creative Practice
My friend Holly Wren Spaulding, a poet and teacher whom I wrote about in [Im]Possible Business, runs a thriving school for poets and secret poets called Poetry Forge. Her own creative practice and her business exist in a symbiotic relationship; if you follow her closely, she doesn’t often use her own work to market Poetry Forge, and yet, her creative self is fully present and alive within her business.
I asked Holly how she sees the relationship between her livelihood work and her own art:
One of the things, I guess I knew this early on, but it took me some years to truly accept about myself, is that I simply can't do work that doesn't feel like it uses the creative part of my brain.
I never really had a job full time where I was doing something that didn't involve being creative. Anytime I considered doing that— and I did over and over again of necessity, you know, just anytime I was really despairing at how little money I was making— I ran up against this feeling that it was untenable to spend my days doing something that would require putting aside the creative part of myself. And might not leave me much energy or time to write, to make art, to be who I am.
This question of the day job has long been one of the concerns of artists. So few of us make full time livings from our work alone. For some of us, a job disconnected from our creative work makes sense. For some of us, that disconnection is untenable.
I think the same thing about business: to what extent does the Venn diagram of livelihood work and creative work become a circle?
I consider myself really fortunate to be in an occupation as a teaching artist where I can use [creative] skills. I can have a regular outlet for my creativity, that's expressed in my teaching. Of course, there's a really symbiotic relationship between teaching, supporting other writers, and my own daily writing practice.
Because I'm also a business owner, I feel fortunate that having a business, running a business, making decisions in a business, creating, in my case, a school for poets itself feels like a really creative endeavor.
Despite what I wrote above about Wanderwell’s structure, I feel the same way. My business also feels like a site of creative practice, the space of a practicing artist.
Holly ended by saying something that speaks to heart of finding ones own way; of not adhering to trends, or supposed to’s in supporting a vibrant creative life:
I have really intentionally designed a business, designed work for myself, a job for myself that plays to my natural inclinations, my nature. And it's all of a piece, right? So I don't feel like I'm at odds with myself or my life or my nature when I'm working on the business because it is in collaboration, in conversation with my goals as a writer, my projects as a poet, my identity as an artist, and the way my imagination moves through the world.
I’m sharing my example, Holly’s, not because these are “correct” paths, but because ultimately I wish for us all to pursue the path which best suits each of our natural inclinations.
The problem, of course, is that the deck mostly feels stacked against us in figuring that out.
The Market Will Not Save Us
Substack is an interesting development, at least you get paid right away and it’s up to you to create your own market. But again, why am I suddenly my own marketing team concerned with converting subscribers? Why am I looking at data? I worry that I’m doing something wrong, or I’m writing something people don’t care about. My concerns are centred [sic] around promoting, sharing, growing my subscriber base, and each time I post I feel guilty of being repetitive. The thing is, these are not the concerns of an ARTIST.
— From Getting Paid -
The thing that magazines and galleries do is to collectivize overhead to support artists and writers. They are the marketing departments, the finance departments, the folks that track the data and deal with the customer whose credit card expired.
Substack grew as a platform alongside a breakdown and fracturing of stable jobs for writers. And there are many examples of folks who have successfully replaced their writer job income (and more!) by building their own platform.
The promise of platform of one’s own is freedom from all the drawbacks, the precarity, and the constraints of the “old ways” of getting paid. There’s also the promise of building an asset and earning profit that you own and keep.
When the traditional platforms that supported writers fracture, when jobs are lost, I can only save myself is an entirely rational response.
But, like most everything in neoliberalism, the twin of I can only save myself is I have to do everything myself.
When you just want space to create, for the joy of it, a fractalization process where we all become mini business owners worrying about monetizing our output and building our audiences…well, that takes up an awful lot of space!
What unnerves me most is that all of these roads point to individuals needing to figure out, individually, how to make an individual living…and…that is not freedom. Not really.
Commodifying Creative Practice
A lot of what’s influencing the economy writ large is a long term shift into asset-derived wealth and income, and away from labor as integral and valued. Such an economy values creativity to the extent that it can be turned into commodifiable assets...like, a monetized audience.
Which brings us back to the three inch long brain parasite Tara wrote of: a parasite that turns our creative worth into transactional relationships. That parasite is how we, creators, artists, are tricked into asking what our audience owes us. That parasite turns what is intrinsically worth our efforts and attention into value on a marketplace.
It’s not that we artists would rather toil in obscurity and hide our work in a cave5. But there’s a difference between people seeing your work and turning those people into an audience to extract value (aka, $$$) from. And that difference often, in practical terms, comes down to space, to creative and editorial freedom.
I don’t begrudge any of us the ways in which we’re trying to make it work. The issue is not whether we make money or not. It’s not that having paying subscribers is a “bad” thing.
I just think we deserve so much more to support our creative spirits. To not have to be marketing departments, to not worry about whether what we create will land or lead to growth.
And of course, there’s a bit of a con going on: the exhortations for freedom via creativity-derived wealth creation…are often coming from exhorters who generate their wealth not from their own creative work, but from teaching creators how to monetize their creative work. That’s an essay for another day, but it’s worth paying attention to how they actually make their money.
What I wish for us all— the artists, the poets, the writers, the creatives— is to imagine support for our work beyond placing our bets on the market. Beyond platforms that we don’t own, that can change their algorithm, their app, without notice.
(Re)Claiming space to create
I’ll close with a few ideas that will help extract that worm and point us in less individualized directions.
First, I’ll posit that we need to cultivate and maintain autonomous zones. Spaces to create and share work outside of obligation, considerations of a sale, and the pressures of linear growth. Protect your secret works like your creative spirit depends on it.
This is…really hard to do as individuals.
Which brings me to the second imagining:
What kinds of broader structures might actually offer us the space to create for the love of it?
How about meeting some basic needs? According to Art.Coop,
An artist living in a community land trust in New York City will have 27 hours a week to make art, compared to an artist in market-priced housing who will have 4 hours a week for making.
Another idea: pay people to just be artists.
Another idea ::whispers:: what if Substack were a platform cooperative?
We do happen to have a rare bookkeeping opening or two as of this writing. ;)
Two of my current consulting clients came to us because someone forwarded them an email of mine.It’s worth saying that a small audience isn’t the same as saying without influence or impact, I’ve long had a bit of a quiet cult following, and that suits me just fine.
It goes without saying that most artists don’t make a living from their art alone. Desk jobs, teaching, temp work; there’s a long rich history of the sorts of side work artists and creatives have done to fund their creative practices.
Which were mostly 1. Accountants doing the books, which is almost never a good idea. 2. Clients “doing it themselves”, aka, not doing it. Or 3. Hiring an individual bookkeeper, which often resulted in sloppy and poorly set up books. I think the profession and options have actually improved quite a bit in the last decade, and I have a small rolodex of colleagues I recommend when we’re not the right fit. This really wasn’t the case back then.
Okay, I’ll admit *some of us* wouldn’t mind hanging in the cave…👀👀