The Three Micahs

Things to Do While LJ is Down

2011-07-27T11:47:00.000-04:00

Catch up on the Three Micahs here!

Read some of my free stuff at Smashwords or Amazon.

Start reading The Flight of the Godkin Griffin, which is partially archived at my website. This is the novel which, once tidied, will be published later this year/early next; it was my first web serial.

Catch up on Black Blossom, my current serial: this week's episode was archived on Stardancer. Or re-read (or read for the first time) the prequels, The Aphorisms of Kherishdar and The Admonishments of Kherishdar.

Start reading Rosary, my other serial project, at its still-not-finished website.

Catch up on Spots the Space Marine, if you lost track of it at some point.

Browse my 3400+ image archive at Stardancer, either chronologically, or by topic.

Or poke through my marketplace!

If all else fails, look at gorgeous food photographs and recipes at Tastespotting. >.>

Pricing, Final Cartoon

2011-05-02T11:34:00.001-04:00

Pricing (or, the 99 Cent E-Book), Finale

2011-05-02T10:11:00.002-04:00

Welcome back to the Three Micahs on Pricing! In Part 1 we introduced our topic and covered Artist's first two objections to pricing. In Part 2 we covered the remainder of her objections. Now it's time for us to get down to business and answer the burning question: How do you price your products?

The Three Jaguars Get Practical
It is essential to have a high-level plan for your art business. This plan will allow you to figure out what you need to do to reach your goals and give you the information you need to make snap decisions on pursuing opportunities you might not have time or data to do numbers on.

To make your plan, answer the following questions:

1. How much time do I have? You must be ruthlessly honest answering this question. If you have four hours a week after family and day-job obligations, that's how much time you have. Don't fudge it. Use your weekly number to estimate your yearly work hours.

2. How much do I want to earn? Are you aiming to make full-time money? Grocery money?

3. How much work do I produce on average? Again, be honest. If you only write one novel a year, that's what you write down. If you only get four paintings done a year, write that down. Use last year as an average.

3a. Do I have enough time to produce the work I have planned? Here's where you find out whether your goal is to get more time or to get more ideas.

4. Are the markets for the products typically produced by my art form particularly vulnerable to technology? While all art is going to have to respond to technological changes, some are positively hammered by them: art, writing and music come to mind.

5. Do I want to aim for the extreme high-end of my market? All art forms have a high-end market, a place inhabited by the absolute masters of the craft (or the marketing). Fine artists might make thousands of dollars a piece; highly-trained musicians might demand the same for a single performance. If you are willing to put in the time and money to reach that pinnacle, and are willing to do the specialized marketing to enter that arena, then note that here.

Now, have a look at your answers and see how they fit together. If you have little time and make few pieces of art, but have the goal of making enough a year to live on, realize that you will either have to change your expectations, find more time to make more work, or aim for the high-end market. If you have a great deal of time but make few pieces of art, then find out why: are you using that time productively? Do you just not have enough ideas?

Get a picture of your work profile. Someone with not many ideas and a lot of time might have the leeway to leap on even vague opportunities, while someone with not much time and too much work to produce might be better served sticking to what they're doing rather than chasing nebulous chances.

Finally, use your high-level plan to estimate how much money an hour you need to make after expenses in order to meet your goal. If you have calculated that you have 520 hours a year and you want to make $30,000, you need to be making about $58 an hour. Keep this number in mind. It is very important!

Now that you have a high-level plan, let's move on to more specific decisions.

Forming a Strategy
The first step to choosing a price for your product is... to choose the product you're offering. As we've mentioned before, your piece of art can become any number of products. It's your job to figure out which ones you want to offer... and for that, you have to know who you're selling to and the market conditions that you'll be selling in. You can begin by answering these questions:

1. Who is my target market? Does my work appeal to families? Young men? Teen girls? People who like technology? People who consider themselves literary? If you don't already know the answer to this question, you can learn it by observing who buys your work.

2. Where is their money coming from? Once you know who buys your work, figure out where their money is coming from. Single men and women who like to read and like technology are probably earning their own money. Preteens are probably getting it from their parents. It's important to have an idea of how much disposable income your patrons have, because this allows you to plan for whether you'll need one or two of them (affluent patrons without dependents) or hundreds (teen girls with part-time jobs... or none at all!).

3. What else are they buying? Now you need to identify what other things your customers also buy. This helps you identify your competition... and your opportunities. If your teen girl audience is buying both your books and manga, you have to out-compete the manga... or, you have to expand into that market.

4. Who do you want considered as your competitors? Once you know what you're competing against... ask whether you want to be. Say your art, currently marketed on keychains and stickers, is competing with other tchotchkes... and you are only making fifty cents, on average, per sale. Maybe instead you'd prefer to be selling original artwork to collectors, putting you in competition with more rarified artists... and netting you the occasional high-ticket sale.

5. What trends do you see in the market? Tablets are exploding and your target market is affluent enough to buy them. Is there some way you can take advantage of that emerging market? Online gaming is a tremendous economic powerhouse, and your younger market segment loves to play them. Is there some way you can tap the same impulse (while avoiding trademark issues!)? Remember: every change is an opportunity.

Once you answer these questions, you should have some notion of the kind of people who buy your work... and an idea of what kind of products to market to them.

Case Study 1: High-Volume, Low-Cost Items
For instance. You are an artist drawing cartoon animals. Your work primarily appeals to young people and parents who have children. People in your target audience don't have a lot of discretionary income, which is a bad thing... but there are a lot of them, which is a good thing. They often buy other items like toys and age-appropriate clothes. Your competitors? Are the giant corporate trademarked characters being sold in every store—something that doesn't cause you anxiety, because by observing your potential customers you know those cartoons often irritate parents who hate their children being sold into the consumer market before they're old enough to talk.

You decide to target the parents who are upset at the lack of choices for non-trademarked character art. They are buying toys, plushes, wall art (which includes murals and wall clings for children to use in their rooms), coloring books and clothes. You decide to investigate these avenues. Your goal: to make merchandise and sell in volume to make up for the low profit-per-unit.

Case Study 2: Low-Volume, High-Cost Items
You like to do calligraphy and are tired of hand-lettering hundreds of envelopes for wedding invitations, which makes you good money but takes you too much time. Your work has broad appeal depending on the subject matter you choose, but it is especially attractive to people for special occasion gifts. Your competitors are other people offering personalized gifts... but you believe you can offer a more attractive product by being particularly creative.

You decide to start selling birthday commissions, in which you accept the name of the person and their birthdate and time and offer a variety of add-ons to the piece: "This Day in History," birthstone colors, zodiac information (Chinese and/or Western), time-of-year information (like autumn themes for October birthdays), etc. You allow your buyers to customize the piece and charge accordingly, planning to accept far fewer of these commissions, but make more.

Choosing a Product
Once you've decided on a strategy it's time to research your products and assess their production cost. Remember that cost involves (at its highest level) two different expenses:

• MONEY. This is the obvious one. If making a plush toy costs you $4 in fabric and $2 in filling and two dollars in thread and random bits like buttons for the eyes, then your material cost to make the plush toy is $9. You'll have to charge more than that to make a profit.

• TIME. This is the one people often forget. If you have a plush toy that costs $9 to produce and you're charging $12 for it, you are making $3. But say it takes you three hours to make this plush toy. Now you are making a dollar an hour.

Go find the money-per-hour figure you calculated off your high level plan. I'm betting it's higher than a dollar. Our example figure, in fact, was $58. But somehow, you come to the reluctant conclusion that no one is going to pay you $174... plus $9 for the material cost! For a single plush animal. This is why it's important to research costs. Do a prototype, give it a test run... go look for the cheapest place to buy the materials you want.

So, keeping costs in mind, research what it would cost to productize your art in the ways you've identified would be most attractive to your target markets. Maybe you've got a lot of administrative assisants who want mousepads, or a lot of smartphone users who want awesome phone backgrounds or independent film-makers who could use soundtracks... the possibilities are as endless as your creativity. If running the numbers on one product makes it clear it's not going to work out for you, look into another.

Do this until you've built a portfolio of products and services that you believe you can afford to make, from pretty cool and probably cheap to ultra-premium spiffy.

Now, you are ready to set your prices.

Pricing
You have your material and time costs calculated for everything you want to sell. You have the per-hour number you need to make to hit your target goal. You have a selection of items you'd like to make. You've looked around to see what other people are charging for them. Now it's time to actually do the price-setting.

By this point, you should have an idea of what I'm about to say:

Calculate how much money it costs for you to produce something. Figure out how much time it takes. And then price it to hit the per-hour amount you need to make your target after you add the expenses. Then have a look at the market and see if anyone's selling for around that amount. If you're in the right range, good job! You've got your price.

But wait! you say. What if it doesn't match what's in the market? Like the example above, the plush toy that costs almost $200! What do I do if I have to set my price too high for the market I'm targeting??

You have these choices:

1. Sell something else. This product isn't cost-effective for you; you need to choose products that are.

     But I really want to sell plush toys!

2. All right! If you really want to sell plush toys, find a way to make them cheaper. If the material cost is what's holding you back, find a place that sells your materials for cheaper or in bulk. Or choose cheaper materials. If it's the time spent that's too high, practice making plush toys until you can finish one in half an hour instead of three.

     I've tried those things, and my plush toys still cost too much! But I still really want to sell plush toys!

3. Adjust your expectations of how much money you're going to be making a year. If you can't afford to set your prices to recoup the per-hour cost of your stuffie rabbits, then decide you will make do with making only half the amount a year that you planned. Then you can lower the per-hour cost and get your prices down.

     But I can't lower that yearly income number... I have to make that much to pay the bills!

4. Try outsourcing your labor: find a company that does nothing but produce plush toys and see if they'd be willing to produce yours for you. Be aware that you still have to run numbers on this enterprise: if it takes you an hour to prepare a template for them to use and it costs you $20 to have a prototype sent to you, and if there are set-up fees, etc, etc, all that needs to go into the cost bucket and used to set your prices.

     I can't find anyone to do that! Or at least, not for reasonable money! What do I doooooooo?

5. You can try making your plushes worth $200. Personalize them, or do something crazy like sell your services as entertainment for kids' parties ("Custom plushes made for your birthday girl, to her specifications, at her birthday party in front of her and all her friends!").

     I can't figure out a premium version of my product. Am I out of luck?

6. The last thing you can try is selling your product at the amount you need to get by and seeing if anyone bites. Maybe there is a market for your $200 plush toys. You won't know unless you try!

The Psychology of Pricing (Or, What Do You Do After You Start Selling)
So you have a bunch of products. You have set your prices. You start selling.

Your work is not done.

Now it's time to watch your sales statistics (which you are recording/tracking—see the Three Micahs column on Metrics for more tips on this), monitor your customers' reactions and finesse your prices based on your goals. Here are some basic observations on how humans interact with products:

Higher Prices = Fewer Sales
For the most part, the higher your prices, the fewer people you'll get to buy. This can be handy if, for instance, you have too much work and not enough time. If you are a jewelry-maker and you have more orders than you can handle, increase your prices until you can keep up with demand. This will also have a favorable impact on your bottom line and correctly imply to your potential customers that you are in very high demand.

Higher Prices = Expectations of Greater Value/Services
As we mentioned earlier in this column, people expect that a higher-priced product will be worth more in some way. Be careful of setting your prices higher than you are willing to back in quality or service. Someone buying a $2000 original should not receive it naked in an otherwise empty envelope, shipped without insurance. If you are not willing to go the extra mile to give $2000 service, don't sell a $2000 product.

On the other hand, if you do offer quality service or premium value, you should increase the price on your product to inform your customers that they will be treated like the kings and queens they are.

(You can also use this particular psychology to increase the perception of value of your product, but we do not recommend inflating your prices in order to make your brand seem more special. Choose a price that you believe your product is worth, that you believe in, and let other people talk you up.)

Lower Prices/Sales = More Impulse Buys
Lowering the price on a product to below the impulse threshold for that product can help you broaden your audience. People will often buy things they might not ordinarily try if the price is low enough or it's on sale. They might give your work a chance, and this may convert them into a fan.

Broad Range of Prices = Broad Range of Buyers
As much as possible (and as it is cost-effective for you) you want to offer something for every budget and every level of fan, from the driveby guests to the casual appreciators to the collectors. It's best not to shut out anyone if you can avoid it. If someone can only give you 99 cents and it costs you very little to make a 99 cent option available, do so.

Caution! When developing products for a broad range of buyers, be sure to differentiate them sufficiently so as not to cut into each other's markets. If you offer a 99 cent song for download, don't make the 10-song album $20... unless it contains album art, singer's notes, or something else to make it worth more as a product than the single download.

People Like to Be Generous
If at all possible, never put a ceiling on the amount you will accept. Some products lend themselves to "at least $15" style prices, and technology exists to allow customers to enter their own amounts. If you allow them to do so and they like your work, they may often give you more than you ask for.

Similiarly, always give customers a way to express extra appreciation by giving them some way to tip you. It doesn't have to be obtrusive—say, on the front page of your website—but it should be easy to find (a tab on the menu that says 'tip the artist'). Not to say that the front page of your website is a bad place for it. It doesn't matter where your tip mechansim is or how you make it available, so long as you do it.

As you watch your receipts come in, keep an eye on your income. If you aren't earning enough, don't lower your prices immediately; find a new product that you can produce for cheaper or market to a different group of people and see if you can hit your target.

A Sample List of Premium Products
And now, by special request... some sample products, with premium versions, for different art disciplines. Please keep in mind these examples do not cover the entire range of awesome marketing ideas, so don't decide because you can't offer the example you can't do any. (And yes, if you like any of the premium ideas, go ahead and use them!).

WEB COMIC
     Basic: Daily strip online.
     Premium: Archive of strips yet to be posted, up to two weeks in advance, allowing readers the chance to read what's coming up next.

FICTION
     Basic: Selection of cheap short stories available in e-book format.
     Premium: Ability to purchase a "ticket" that gives the reader the chance to commission a sequel to one of her favorite short stories.

ART (DIGITAL)
     Basic: Downloadable wallpaper.
     Premium: Monthly email with attached wallpaper with calendar featuring patron's avatar or game character dressed in different outfits according to the time of year.

KNITTING/CROCHETING
     Basic: Blanket.
     Premium: Winter Dorm-Room Package: one blanket, gloves, hat and scarf in a new college attendee's school colors (or fantasy school's, like Hogwarts).

MUSIC
     Basic: Single songs available for download.
     Premium: Commission to have a song written to the words of a client's poem, with included recording in lossless digital format of the singer performing it.

CARD READINGS
     Basic: Five-card reading in email.
     Premium: Five-card reading over patron's choice of email, telephone or in person (within a certain driving radius), with "meditation package" sent to the patron including a stick of incense, a depiction of a card from their reading, and a small tea light.

POETRY
     Basic: Physical book of poetry.
     Premium: Physical book of poems by the author selected by the client, with special dedication.

COSPLAY COSTUMES
     Basic: Clothes to cosplay as the client's favorite character.
     Premium: Complete cosplay service, in which you hunt down overseas or specialty vendors for items like wigs, boots and reproductions of special weapons/pins/jewelry.

JEWELRY
     Basic: Beautiful necklace.
     Premium: "Coming of Age" package, where mom buys girl celebrating her puberty a necklace and earrings; she gets to choose her own stones and style to commemorate her coming of age.

PLUSH TOYS
     Basic: A single plush toy.
     Premium: A one-of-a-kind plush toy made on demand for a child at her birthday party from the materials she selects. (Someone please do this, I would totally buy it. >.>)

The list here is endless. In fact, the list is so endless that Marketer Jaguar has promptly popped up to say:

As you can see, there are truly few things that can't be productized. Even productizing!

But Wait! (A Small Issue)
But wait! you say. I don't control my own pricing!

For various reasons, you may not have the ability to set your own prices, probably because you are selling through an intermediary and part of your contract allows them to change the retail prices. If you don't control your own pricing, it is still important to be aware of all the things we've spoken of.

Why?

1. So you can agitate your business partner into staying responsive to the market. If you sign a contract with someone allowing to sell a product based on your artwork, you are their business partner, not their supplicant. It is imperative to treat the relationship like a partnership, request explanations, do audits, ask for changes. Art is your passion and the mainstay of your spirit. But your products are your livelihood and represent your best chance at making a living at what you're doing. No one will care about your passion and your profit and your ability to make a living the way you will, so don't let your business partners off the hook. Be your own advocate.

That's the first reason you should remain aware of pricing. The second, of course, is:

2. ...so you can jump ship if your business partner makes consistently poor decisions. A business partner that does not treat you like a full equal in that partnership, who doesn't listen to or respond to your reasonably-presented concerns, your sales data or your ideas should be left behind the moment your contract allows it. Remember: no one cares about your livelihood the way you do. So if you can't make someone see eye-to-eye on something that is impacting your ability to earn an income, leave them and find someone willing to engage you as an equal.

Epilogue

If you are to take away anything from this column, we would draw your attention back to the separation of art from product. Your art is not the product; it is not worth the money its products get on the market. It will always be something more sublime than money can describe with a price tag. The artist who doesn't understand this distinction will always be a resentful beggar: on one hand, feeling angry that her art isn't "worth more" and resenting the patrons who don't pay her enough, and on the other feeling like she is importuning anyone she asks for money because art doesn't seem to have a price. The transaction ceases to be between someone producing something and offering it for sale... and becomes one where the artist is selling her soul and hating people for not thinking it's worth more than a cup of coffee.

Remember: once you put a price tag on something, it ceases to be about your heart and becomes about the way it gets into the hands of other people. Give the business of pricing to Marketer and Business Manager and send Artist back to her studio, and everyone will be much happier.

In conclusion: stay aware of your own unexamined assumptions. Question yourself constantly. Watch the market; poll your customers. Remember that the art is not the product and that financial success has no bearing on artistic merit. Reassure yourself that changing prices to reflect market realities and to adjust for demand, expectation and even your own short-term and long-term goals is okay. And then go forth and play. The economy is a big experiment, and art lends itself fabulously to high-premium productizing. You have very little to lose and a great deal to learn!

This concludes the Three Micahs on Pricing! As you can see, this was a rather enormous column, so don't be alarmed if it takes some time to work through all the information in it. We hope that it helps you form a strategy for your own pricing, one that takes into account both your needs and the changing market. In our next edition, we hope to take on building brand loyalty! So tune in then for more cartoon jaguars, and as always, feel free to tip if you're so inclined!

Click here to fund the Three Micahs column!
If you prefer to send physical money, you can email me for my address at haikujaguar at gmail.

Pricing (or, the 99 Cent E-Book), Part 2

2011-04-29T10:10:00.002-04:00

Welcome back to the Three Micahs on Pricing! In part 1 we introduced the topic and covered the first two of Artist's objections. But as you recall, she had many more! So let's get back to it.

How Will I Make a Living if Everyone's Pricing Their Stuff So Cheap? Or, Market Awareness
In a market where every product of a similar type is priced along similar lines, the one product that's more expensive had better have a good reason for its exemption or no one will take it home... and the one product that's less expensive will, if it's perceived to be of similar quality, be the sales leader. When artists rally around one another and decide, en masse, to keep their prices at a certain level, they are attempting to protect themselves from those devaluations.

It doesn't work. Inevitably, someone will decide to sell for cheaper in order to sell more often or in greater volume, and then the whole scheme collapses.

As an artist selling products based on your work, you have two jobs, then:

1. Research the current market value for the product you're attempting to sell, and figure out how to make it cheaper;

2. And guess how the market is going to change to make that price invalid.

You can imagine neither of these activities is low-stress. They are both, however, necessary. You are competing in a market that is vulnerable to technological change, and nothing affects pricing like technology.

Your goal, as much as possible, is to liberate your particular product from the price fluctuations of the market. You can do this by attempting to create a price monopoly, as in the (poorly orchestrated) attempt I once witnessed wherein furry artists tried to set baseline prices for services they sold at conventions (this price monopoly lasted maybe a month). Or you can be more successful at it by constantly seeking ways to make your product cheaper to produce.

The rule is very simple:

Case Study: Art Cards
For instance. You draw 3"x5" art cards to spec, an activity that takes you an hour per piece. In the current market atmosphere, artists sell these for between $15 and $30. You price them at $20. It costs you $6 in materials and time to create these cards, so a price of $20 allows you to make $14 an hour after expenses.

You can continue to price these at $20 and hope the market allows that price to remain reasonable. Or you can attempt to maximize your profit level by trying these things to minimize your expenses:
     1. Learning to execute the art more quickly, either by changing style or detail level, or practicing until you get faster, so that you can do more pieces per hour.
     2. Buying your supplies in bulk or on sale to push down the material cost per piece.
     3. Deciding to sell these card commissions as phone or tablet backgrounds, doing away with physical costs completely.

Or these things to maximize your revenue:
     1. Selling prints of the resulting art cards.
     2. Finding a market niche that supports a higher per-piece level—for example, marketing to people who like pictures of reptiles and can't find many.
     3. Selling the digital rights separately from the physical product, and offering both to the customer.

Say the floor falls out from under your $20 price and you find yourself forced to reduce your prices to $10 in order to secure more commissions. If it takes you $6 to create the card, you are now only making $4 a card! But if you cut your expenses in half, you're up to $7. And if you add extra revenue-generating activities, you might double your returns.

The point? "How will I make a living?" is a question that can only be answered by constant assessment of the market, and constant adjustment of your product strategy. If your publisher sells your e-books for $15 each because every other publisher does, then you're in good shape... until the first independent author comes along and undercuts you by $10. If your books stop selling well, your choice is to take the hit or find a way to make money in some other way to supplement your income. You cannot depend on the way it's been done before to save you, which brings us to...

Other People's Books Are Priced at $15! Or, Pricing and (Lack of) Precedence
We've said before that art is often productized, delivered and marketed in a way that makes it particularly vulnerable to technological change. If there is a truth to be embraced about pricing—about business in general—it's right here:

How it was done before doesn't matter. How it's done now doesn't matter. To really succeed, you need to be guessing how it's going to be done tomorrow... and doing it.

People's expectations are changing with the technology, not with the art form. When smartphones are widespread, their expectations will be shaped by 99 cent apps and $2 games. When tablets are broadly accepted, their expectations will be shaped by digital magazines, downloadable wallpapers and artists offering commissions on graphic apps. With e-book readers everywhere, people's expectations are shaped by the instant gratification of the immediate download... and the low-tech format of their ebook.

Everywhere around you, technology is shaping what people expect, how they consume art and what they expect to pay for it. Their beliefs will be shaped not by the worth of the art, but by the characteristics of the product. Do they own it? Can they reproduce it? Is it high or low-resolution? Is it personal? Is it immediate?

It doesn't matter how art is priced now. What matters is how it's packaged and how much people perceive that packaging to be worth. You can't afford to get attached to how much someone else is selling something for. Chances are good that tomorrow, people will have moved on to something else they believe gives them better value for their dollar.

Case Study: or, the 99 Cent E-book
An excellent case in point: the discussion that inspired this column involved the three—well, two—jaguars proclaiming they were all in favor of 99 cent e-books. At no point in the ensuing dialogue did anyone bring up the very important distinction that the three jaguars were talking about... e-books.

E-books. Not novels.

The existing industry standards developed while productizing and marketing stories issued on paper. As such, length was key. Long books cost more to produce: they had a higher physical material cost (more paper, glue, etc) and they took up more space in inventory. But very short works were just as difficult to issue in paper: their length made producing them as single items cost-ineffective, and attempts to productize them using the same method as long-form works—producing things that looked like novels but contained short stories—rarely inspired the sales volume necessary to recoup the investment.

In addition, length dictated much of the editorial guidelines as editors strove to find a balance between the stories they wanted to publish and the limitations of their paper vehicles. Authors couldn't sell novellas because they took up too much space in short fiction markets and not enough in novel markets. Books ended up split into parts that were never intended to be sold that way because of their size as physical volumes (see: The Lord of the Rings).

But whether an e-book is one page or one thousand, it is still sold through the same channels and is packaged, on the surface, in the same way. Browsing the average e-bookstore, most consumers won't even realize how long the story they're buying is. We don't speak of e-novels and e-novellas and e-short stories, but of e-books. And as such, 99 cents is a perfect price point for an e-book... which is short in length.

Why? Because where there is no obvious indicator of length, price is a perfect vehicle for communicating this information to the buyer.

Books have not been sold in this fashion before. Most hardcovers are $25 (right now). Most trade paperbacks are $15 (right now). Most paperbacks are $8.99 (right now). If a book isn't long enough to look good as a $25 hardcover, layout artists will arrange the text until it takes up the right amount of pages. (This is why sometimes you buy a hardcover and it seems more whitespace than text.) Books don't need to price for length, since they can make any book's spine look about the same as another's with tricks like font size and leading. Instead, the implication of the existing pricing tier is that you are paying for longevity/sturdiness: $25 for a hardcover that you can keep for decades and $9 for a paperback that will probably fall apart in a year, with trade paperbacks a compromise between the two.

But we are in a new market now, with new needs. Consumers are already used to thinking of price as an indicator of volume: you pay $5 for a small bottle of honey and $15 for two pounds, and of course, two pounds is more than the little bottle. Translating that thinking to e-books works fairly well. Paying 99 cents for a short story and $4 for a novel? One is longer than the other. Of course! But because we become trapped in How Things Were Before, we often don't even see how the product a piece of art becomes can change so radically with technology as to need entirely new pricing... and terminology.

E-book. Novel. Not equivalent. You can't apply paper standards to electronic packaging.

I've Spent Months of My Life on This! Or Gating
Artist has a vague sense that she deserves to be compensated for the time she spends making art. Even more than that, she perceives that the life experience she alchemizes into art has value, that she deserves as least as much an hour as some database programmer somewhere. But in general, Artist's conception of these things is nebulous.

To really talk about this objection, we need the Business Manager.

If you've read previous columns, you'll recall that time-tracking—logging the hours it takes to produce a single piece of art—is one of Business Manager's jobs. Her goal in doing so is to give those statistics to Marketer with the injunction, "Make this worth my time."

Marketer says, "Okay!" and goes to work. Her job: to take this single piece of art and make as many products from it as possible, pricing them at what the market will bear, in order to recoup the time and material cost of the project and make a profit.

Scenario 1: Too Much Time
So, say, you need a year to write a novel. Artist delivers it. Business Manager frowns at the time, then tells Marketer, "Twelve months, one piece of art. Have at it."

...and now Marketer has the unenviable task of trying to make a year's worth of income from a single piece of art.

She might try any number of tactics: cheap e-books, sold in volume. Physical copies, also sold in volume. Premium special editions for high-end collectors. Merchandise, such as mugs with taglines from the novel or shirts with the cover art. Auctions of scribbled notes made during the art process, unique items representing glimpses into the writer-brain. She might try advertising, cross-pollination with other artists, book signings and appearances. And if she's lucky as well as exceptional, she might turn one piece of art into a year's income. Might.

It's tempting to make everything more expensive so that she'll get a better profit per item... but raising prices makes sales sluggish, particularly if they're above the market average. That is not a good solution. What's far more likely is that she'll return to Artist and Business Manager and say, "Make more art faster."

Sad fact: with rare exception, a single masterpiece every few years will not suffice to earn your bread. If you work slowly and don't want to work any faster, or don't believe you can, then you must content yourself with a very small salary. If you want better income, you will have to learn to either become a genius at marketing—not a task to which most artists want to apply themselves—or figure out how to produce art more frequently.

Scenario two: Too Little Time

On the other hand, maybe you write a short story every week, a novel every two months and fill in all the extra spaces with essays, poems and columns. Artist enters the studio every day and exits it in a burst of fluttering papers. Business Manager looks at this blankly, then hands a ginormous stack of things to Marketer and says, "Um, enjoy!"

Marketer looks at it all and has a momentary spasm of joy. And then slowly, a louring sense of doom. She knows:
     1. Placing this much work takes time. If it takes three hours to completely productize one piece of art, imagine the administrative time involved doing sixty.
     2. Placing too much work on the market at a time can flood it, particularly if you are operating in a single arena. If Artist is into nothing but science fiction and writes sixty science fiction shorts... there aren't even sixty markets for that work. If Marketer is lucky, Artist explodes into multiple venues, and is drawing pictures of manta rays, writing romance novels and penning science fiction poems while crafting jewelry with her spare toes. Then she can at least release work to the market in manageable chunks.

It's tempting to make prices cheaper so that Artist will get the work out the door and have more to do, and sometimes that can be the answer. But pricing things too low can cause its own set of problems (discussed later).

Marketer's most common strategy in this case:
     1. Select the most common forms of product for one piece of art and arrange those.
     2. Arrange for premium versions only for those pieces of art that seem most likely to net those sales, based on sales data, customer surveys and often gut instinct.
     3. Release items on a schedule to keep from flooding the market and to build a backlog for lean times.

If you want a problem, being too quick at making art is definitely a better problem to have than the opposite.

As you can see, pricing is a complicated exercise. Once Artist's objections have been answered, you have a lot to do: plans to create, decisions to make, observations to incorporate. Join us Monday for Part 3, where we advance from the theoretical to the practical. Tune in then for more cartoon jaguars, and as always, feel free to tip if you're so inclined!

If you prefer to send physical money, you can email me for my address at haikujaguar at gmail.

Pricing (or, the 99 Cent E-Book), Part 1

2011-04-27T09:23:00.003-04:00

Recently there has been a prediction floating 'round that one day, most e-books will cost 99 cents! This seems an eminently worthy idea to the Jaguars...

...well, to two of the Jaguars.

That's right. Business Manager and Marketer are perfectly fine with this notion, but Artist is not. And the heart of this disagreement is pricing, a topic so large that when the three jaguars began discussing it, it ballooned into a column large enough to split into three parts.

We have a lot to discuss! So let's begin... with philosophy!

The Disgruntled Artist
It should come as no surprise that in a society that so tightly (and capriciously) links money with worth, Artist might be distressed that her work might end up costing the same amount as a gumball from a candy machine. And yet, if Artist were to attempt to get some picture of what something is worth by its price, look at the mixed signals she would get:

What can you take away from the realization that a piece of cake in a restaurant can cost more than a pack of light bulbs? Or that a piece of underwear can cost the same amount as a cup of coffee? Nothing about the relative worthiness of underwear or coffee. Pricing makes even less sense when applied to art. Who could ever figure out what it's worth to them, a song that they've loved for years, a book that changed their lives? One dollar? A million? Art is irreplaceable in the hearts of those it touches. But the products you make based on your art, those have a definitive monetary value within the market ecosystem, and your job as a business-person is to find that price point.

Pricing and money apply to products, and it is only as products that we can assign prices and judge their suitability.

This is why coffee can cost more than underwear, and cake more than light bulbs: because they are productized differently. Light bulbs and underwear are far more useful, more necessary, than cake and coffee, but what you pay for is the presentation, packaging and marketing experience on the latter two items, not their intrinsic worth.

Let us put paid to the myth then: artistic merit and money are not equivalent. When you approach the question of pricing, you must set aside passion (the Artist's driving attribute) and turn instead to issues of setting buyer expectations, deciding which markets to compete in and gating customer demand. Pricing is the realm of Marketer and Business Manager, so send Artist back to her easel.

(If you missed our column about the difference between your art and the products you create from it, please check out our first column here.)

So then, let's begin with the example above: the 99-cent e-book. This may seem a gross devaluation of work to Artist, who appears here as understandably skeptical. Here are her thoughts:

• Books are not songs, and should not be priced like them. Art forms are not interchangeable!

• How will people know that it's worthwhile if it's only 99 cents?

• If enough authors price their work at 99 cents, people will stop paying for $10 books, and then how will authors make a living?

• Other people's books are priced at $10 or even $15, so why should Artist's be any less? It will make her look cheap!

• She's spent months of her life on the story. Shouldn't she be compensated?

Books Are Not Songs! Or, Competition
Let's begin with Artist's first objection: that just because other forms of art are priced a certain way, that every form of art should be. There is a poorly-grasped marketing truth here, which we will clarify now:

Different forms of art are priced differently because they are productized differently.

A song and a story are both priceless things that float apart from monetary value. But a download of an MP3 and a DRM-free e-book are both products and have a market value which may (or may not!) be distinct from one another.

So to get our hands around the concept of a song costing the same thing as a book, we have to separate the art itself from the product. No, music, dance, art, writing... on a superficial level, these are not the same things. But if they are productized, distributed and marketed in similar ways, then we run into the great leveler:

Competition.

...because a book may not be like a song. And a song might not be like a photo online. And it may not be like a game or an app. But all these things are the same to your buyer: they are all luxury items consumed as entertainment. And that means they're all competing against one another for the person's time and money. Say your fan has $10 to spend a month on entertainment. He can use that money on books, movies, music, games, World of Warcraft subscriptions, tickets to sporting events... whatever floats his boat. Your job as a business-person is to make it easier for him to choose your stuff instead of someone else's.

Step back a moment and truly consider this: The work of your life and hands and spirit, once it hits the marketplace, is sold just like any other commodity. And while we don't want to think of ourselves as interchangeable with other artists—and our fans might assure us that we aren't—our products are not the only products our fans are interested in. Inevitably, they (not being possessed of infinite wealth or time) will have to choose. And while there are customers who cleave only to one form of art, forsaking all others—a person who only likes to read and is bored by music, dance, visual art, games, etc—these people are rare and one should not rely on them for one's livelihood.

In Conclusion
All Artist's beliefs about the singularity of whatever artform she practices aside, her work, once it reaches the market, must be able to compete in price and value with art, games and entertainment of every other kind. It doesn't matter if an app isn't like a song, and a song isn't like a piece of art. It's a discretionary purchase, and your customer has to perceive that it's not just a good value for his money, but a better one than something else. If ten songs can be bought for the price of one of your books, then your book has a lot more work to do to convince someone to buy it instead of ten songs. Or five songs and an app. Or one poem, three songs and two cows in a farming game.

Does it outrage the poor Artist? Indubitably. But it remains an economic reality.

How Will People Know It's Good if It's Only 99 cents? Or, Identifying Real Worth
Artist's next objection is a good one: price does drive perception of worth. But what she misses is that it doesn't drive the perception of the worth of the art, but rather the worth of the product. $15 for a life-changing book is as nonsensical as 15 cents. But $15 for a physical object makes sense because it possesses qualities the market perceives as more valuable.

Art, as we have discussed before, cannot be sold. It must be productized. If your goal is to make a living, you should be brainstorming and releasing products that have as many market-valuable characteristics as you can manage. Different audiences will have different ideas of what's valuable, but among the set of people who buy art, here are some common characteristics:

• Physicality. Many forms of art can be delivered digitally—as an e-book, a copy of a jpeg, a download, etc. If it can be packaged as an object, people tend to value it more, particularly if they have the choice between physical and digital versions. A physical book, a pressed CD, a print... all these things can be sold for more money because most people like to touch things with their hands.

• Immediacy. Some forms of art are initially delivered as performances, such as music, dance, theater, and people are willing to pay more in order to have the immediate experience of the art, more than they would for a recording. With some creativity, unlikely art forms can also be productized this way: art can be created in person or on camera (the popular "Iron Artist" contests at conventions come to mind), stories can be livewritten with prompts from the audience, jewelry can be fashioned to spec in person, etc.

• Uniqueness. One of the great prizes of marketing is uniqueness, because people will pay large sums of money for something for which there is no copy, or which there are poor copies. The actual canvas an artist has touched is worth more than a reproduction. Hand-crocheted hats are worth more than machine-made. The original manuscripts for famous books are auctioned and put in museum collections. We value ties to individual people, and unique items are irreplaceable for their ability to connect us with an artist.

• Portability. As we move further into a digital market, consumers value access to different versions of a piece of art. A physical book with included digital copy is worth more than either alone. A DRM-free song is worth more than a locked one.

• Ownership. As the digital market splinters into pay-to-access and pay-to-own spheres, consumers will always privilege ownership over access rights. People enjoy the idea that buying something entitles them to dispose of it as they choose, and remain concerned that paying for access will deprive them of the art in the future if technology or circumstances change.

• Personalization. Because most people value a connection between themselves and the artists they patronize, any form of personalization is good. This is the need that drives people to stand in line for book signings, or bid on signed baseballs, to commission art or have their names written into songs. Most forms of art can be personalized either during the creation process (as in commissions and prompts) or after (signing, added packaging, etc). A print is worth a certain amount of money. A print that a client is able to have matted in the color that matches her living room is worth more.

• Personal Attention. Closely related to personalization is personal attention, the sense that one can have a dialogue with and even some kind of relationship with the artist in question. People value the ability to shake a hand and look in someone's eye. They like to be remembered as the customer who likes dragons or the client who needs her items mailed to her workplace rather than to her house. Any time you are responsive, communicative and able to accommodate special requests, you are delivering personal attention.

A good gut-instinct guideline for determining premium services: the more senses a product engages, the more money you can ask for it. If you can touch and hear something as well as see it, you're better off than if you can only see it. An original piece of artwork even has a smell depending on what it was made with. Sensory input makes things real to people; studies show that people who can touch products are more likely to buy them. So go with your gut and make your products as sensuous an experience as possible.

Many of the characteristics above can be combined. The more of them you stack in a single product, the more money you can ask for, and should. A DRM-locked e-book of a 300-page novel may only be worth two bucks. The same novel, as a special edition with a foil-embossed cover, signed and dedicated to a specific customer by the author and annotated in the margins with notes, presented in person with a "thank you for buying" card, may be worth several hundred.

Here we pause in our deliberations on pricing. We will continue discussing Artist's objections on Friday, in Part 2. On Monday, Part 3 will move on to practicalities. So stay tuned for more Three Micahs! Feel free to tip if you're so inclined, and share the Three Micahs with your friends using our handy archive site at http://mcahogarth.blogspot.com.

If you prefer to send money in the mail, email me for my address at haikujaguar at gmail.

You can also visit our Zazzle store to browse fun stuff with jaguar cartoons!

Agility

2011-02-25T10:31:00.000-05:00

And now, by popular demand—Marketer Jaguar insisted when you did!—the Three Micahs return with what was intended to be a short post about change... which naturally became a five-page column. Here then is a new installment of my art business column. Our topic today: Agility.

The Jaguar and the Database
Long, long ago, in the before times, your humble author was working in a software development shop when yet another take on the eternal push to make coding faster and more responsive to customer demands was published, this one entitled the Agile Manifesto (you can read more about that here, if you're interested in the tangent). The powers that be decided to adopt this methodology out of a gut understanding that to be agile in business is a good thing. I didn’t perceive the adoption of the Agile Methodology to do anything more than confuse the coding department, but the concept stuck with me.

It’s with me even now, while I look at the wreck of my customer database. Because I have a customer database.

But Jaguar! (you say). Why is this strange?

Because I have a customer database… as a writer. And I have no templates for how an author uses a customer database because traditionally the work of connecting with customers was undertaken by retailers, who distributed a book sent to them by someone (a distributor) that was supplied by someone (a publisher) who connected with me through someone else (an agent). That’s a lot of layers between me and the people who would have bought my books, and therefore between me and the necessity of having a spreadsheet with people's names and purchasing histories. Had I been through the traditional publishing process, I wouldn’t have needed a customer database. In fact, it would have been rare for me to know the people who bought my books at all unless I met them at a pre-arranged event like a convention or a book signing. But thanks to the wonder of technology and the society it's changing, I can and do sell my work directly to readers. I post my work online, someone passes me a tip… and now I know a name. When I learn a customer name, I write it down (or should).

The paradigm has changed. Simple, right?

It's Never Simple!
Except… that I don’t just sell directly to readers. I also sell my work through distributors, who distribute it to people who have bought it. I don’t know the names of those customers (unless they contact me, or leave a review with their names on it). And instead of taking money directly from those people, I am now policing one (or several!) distributors who owe me royalty checks.

So now I have a customer database which is incomplete, causing my inner Business Manager much upset over the lack of tidiness and my inner Marketer much melancholy over lost opportunities. And I have more than one way of earning money, all of which have to be tracked, maintained and audited. And if I choose to sell in other ways, I'll only end up compounding the complication of my business tracking procedures. Mostly I find myself thinking that this is a lot of work, and that had things remained the way they were before, I wouldn’t have incurred that work at all. Someone else would be tracking customers, leaving me more time to write.

And here is where I return again to the concept of agility, and the fact that necessitates it: Business changes. Society changes. Technology changes. The bad news is that if you aren’t able to move with those changes, you’re not going to make it. The good news? If you are creative about seizing those opportunities, you may waste some time here and there, but you have a chance not just to make it, but to make it big. Or at very least, big by an artist’s standards, which means you'll be comfortable and able to do your thing in peace. More or less!

Let's Get Concrete
So, how to stay agile in the fine art business?

1. First, and most importantly: develop the mindset that changes do not affect you; you take advantage of changes. (You see how "you" became the actor in that second sentence, rather than the object being acted upon?) Changes are opportunities. Think of changes as ways to break out of ruts, find new revenue streams or expand your customer base. You are not the victim of change. You are one of its users. When change comes along, start thinking of ways to make it work for you, rather than bemoaning the loss of whatever it's trampled.

2. You can’t use a change you don’t know about. Keep abreast of developments in your field: magazines and paper newspapers can often be late with their news, so use twitter, blogs and online resources when you can. The sooner you know about changes, the more time you have to think about how you can use them to your advantage.

3. Related to #2, identify the industry leaders in your arena and keep an eye on them. Some companies are consistent innovators, whether it's technologically or process-wise. Where they go, often the market follows.

4. Always budget some amount of money for technology upgrades and market research. Is the hottest new thing in your target market a tablet? Save up and get one. Is there some new program that is all the rage among digital artists? Ditto. Whether it's new shopping cart code or a new kind of brush, learning about something game-changing is not usually enough for you to really understand its possibilities. Get one and play with it and things will occur to you that never will if it remains a thought exercise. If your budget is too small to buy, find someone willing to lend their shiny to you, or go to a store and play with the floor model.

5. Never get too attached to your processes. We all like a routine and we all want to stick with what works, but if you never experiment you might miss out on your Next Big Thing. If this idea makes you uncomfortable, remind yourself that you don't have to stick with it if it's not working for you. And remember: you are not your tools or your processes, which exist only to facilitate your work. If the process or the tools no longer serve the art, or no longer serve it well enough, discard them. The art will remain. It is above and beyond those things.

6. Keep in mind that even if something is working for you now, changes might make it impossible to continue making money that way. It doesn’t matter how good a buggy whip you make when the first car rolls off the assembly line.

7. Listen to what your customers/patrons want. They will tell you what they’re willing to pay for before you've thought of it, or are ready for it! When someone who buys your work says, “I wish—“ that’s your cue to listen very carefully to what comes next. Make sure your knee-jerk reaction to those comments is not “I don’t do that.” Train yourself to say, “I’ll look into that,” or “That’s a very interesting idea, I can’t do it now but I’ll do some research into it,” or “I’m not set up for that—yet!” And believe it when you say it. And then do it.

8. Finally, be okay with mess. Change is rarely simple and never complete. Selling e-books doesn’t mean I can’t sell through publishers doesn’t mean I can’t sell a serial doesn’t mean… etc, etc. If you can’t find rules, processes or anything more concrete than suggestions for how to handle the things you’re trying, that’s a sign that you’re on the track of something new and exciting. Congratulations, put on your hat. You’re a pioneer!

Art, which is often shared or sold via some form of media, is very vulnerable to the technological and social advances that are common today. If you want to make art, none of it need concern you... but if you want to make money from art, then you have to pay close attention to the way people transmit and consume content. That makes it a very exciting time to be working, and a very tumultuous one! Keeping the above points in mind may help you keep your head above water... and maybe even seize some opportunities of your own.

This concludes our entry on Agility! Next time I hope to have a brief diversion into dealing with parents as customers for those of you who do business in person. Tune in then for more cartoon jaguars, and as always, feel free to tip if you're so inclined!

If you prefer to send physical money, you can email me for my address at haikujaguar at gmail.

Un-Slimy Marketing

2010-09-15T11:19:00.001-04:00

It was our plan to devote September's column to the value of self-discipline... but that was before you spoke and nearly overwhelming asked how to market yourself without feeling slimy. Naturally, this woke the Marketer Jaguar, whose first response was something like this:

And then she went to work, because we're here to answer your questions and this one's obviously burning at your minds. So, this month's column is on how to feel good marketing yourself, and make friends doing it. Let's get started!

Now, we all know marketing we like. And we all know marketing we don't. Our problem then, is figuring out what separates the "okay" marketing from the "hate them never want to hear from them again disgusting used-car-salesman ick" marketing so we can stay on the good side of the equation. As far as Marketer Jaguar is concerned, there are three stages of marketing technique, rising from the dregs of slime to the rarified clouds of awesome customer relationships.

Stage One: Gimme Your Money
In the first stage of marketing, your goal is to get people to give you their money. You spend a lot of time thinking about getting money out of people. Or about finding more people to get money out of. You strive very hard to remain upbeat about selling your art, but you probably have thoughts like these:

1. That other artist just sold something! I'm jealous!
2. That's one of my fans, talking about buying something. I wish they'd spend that money on me.
3. Nobody's buying my work. Why won't they buy my work, when crap like [ Highly Successful Artist, like Thomas Kincaide ] sells like hotcakes?

Stage One Marketing results in marketing tactics like these:

1. Being reluctant to link to other artists' work because people might spend their money on them instead of on you.
2. Talking about your bills or problems to help people justify spending money on your work.
3. Rarely talking about anything but money or sales.

If you are fixated on money, your audience will notice. They won't like it. And if you ever make the mistake of voicing those thoughts up there where other people can see them, you will have a lot of public relations work to do to repair your image. It's hard not to linger in this mindset when so many of us are desperate to pay bills, or to get some sense of validation in a society that only seems to recognize the ability to earn money as an indicator of value. But if you want to be content as a creative professional, you need to move up the ladder. Let's consider stage two.

Stage Two: I'm Excited About My Stuff!
At stage two, your enthusiasm for your work bubbleth over, and you are effusive about sharing that enthusiasm with everyone. You love your new projects; you talk about them all the time. This is one of the few places where the Artist drives the marketing effort, because she just can't. Not. TALK ABOUT THE AWESOME! You regularly inhabit stage two if your communication with the outside world is stuff like this:

1. The chapter I just wrote, it just FLOWED out of my fingers! I can't wait to post it!
2. My new brushes just shipped! I haven't used a new brush in months, it makes finicky detailwork so much better!
3. My new album is coming out next week, and I just love this one, it's my best ever!

Stage Two Marketing results in marketing efforts like these:

1. Spending a lot of time talking to, hanging out with or writing blog posts that appeal to other artists in your field.
2. Offering sneak peeks of things you're currently working on.
3. Talking about what you're working on now, even if you can't share it yet.

Now, to be honest, if you were to stop here at this stage, you'd probably be fine. Most people forgive artists some amount of narcissism. Bubbling about your work will incite excitement from your current fans and net you some new ones, and some people get by fine with that. However, you will drive away some number of people who will find your self-satisfaction excessive and your constant talk about things they can't buy yet frustrating. And this inward focus prevents you from rising to the third marketing stage, where Artist looks outside herself and notices...

Stage Three: My Work Lets Me Develop Relationships with Cool People
...other people. This is the point where you look beyond your desk and really feel in your bones that art is communicative: it speaks to the people who like it, and that means the two of you have something in common. And you find you are delighted at the opportunity to meet these people. You're at this point when you often think or say things like this:

1. I love doing readings because at the end I get to talk to my fans!
2. I know her; she bought several things from me before. I think I'll send her a card for the holidays.
3. I am grateful for my fans and patrons. So many awesome people like my work!

Stage Three Marketing results in efforts like these:

1. Writing ad copy while imagining you're talking to someone. Maybe even someone specific.
2. Setting up coffee klatches at the next convention so you have time to talk with your fans.
3. Giving free advice to people who want to want to follow a path similar to yours.

Notice that by this point, you come full circle: in stage one, you are bitter because people aren't giving you money. By stage three, you're delighted because people give you money.

But wait! You say. Do I have to take these stages one by one?

Of course not! I talk about the stages as if we could move through them sequentially, but most of us will bounce between them depending on the day, the art in front of us, and our mood. Our goal, though, is to head away from an attitude that breeds resentment, discontent and negativity and toward one that enhances our relationships with each other and our art.

Why?

Because marketing is about our relationships with other people.

Yes... I'm serious! Just because the connection created by marketing is fleeting doesn't make it meaningless. The cashier who smiles at you, meets your eyes and chats with you while ringing up your groceries is sustaining, for that brief moment, a relationship with you. You leave a store feeling more positive, neutral or negative depending on the interaction you've had with the people selling you things. And as an artist in particular, your relationship with your audience is more intimate because of the nature of your product. You are selling the work of your hands and heart, and that makes any transaction between you and someone interacting with it implicitly a deeper thing.

The people who love and buy your work have something in common with you, and that thing is something that came from in your heart. That makes them kin to you, if only in passing. If you hold that knowledge in your heart when selling your work—that you are not seeking money so much as seeking kin—then chances are you'll be far happier with your business (no matter how small) than if you're in it for the money... which, I must tell you frankly, is a rather bad focus for an endeavor like art-making. There are easier and surer ways to make a buck.

The Jaguar's Philosophy of Marketing
Here then, in brief, is what I believe: that your goal in marketing is to create sustainable relationships with people who want you to succeed; in short, to seek patrons, rather than one-time customers. To do that, you can't be focused on the money or the one-time sale. You want to inspire customer loyalty. You want people to be invested in your success. You want them to feel special... because they are. We live in a society where marketing treats its customers as prey... or victims, happy to pluck their last dollar out of their pocket while convincing them that what they're getting is what they really need, whether that's true or not. Such a system isn't sustainable; eventually, people will run out of money while surrounded in unnecessary stuff, and they will have no money to succeed themselves. The whole thing will grind to a slow, ugly halt.

You know you don't want to be a part of that system; you wouldn't have told me overwhelmingly that marketing feels slimy to you otherwise. So take the jaguar's advice. Think of your customers as people and your marketing efforts as an attempt to make it easy for people who want your work to buy it, not an attempt to get more people to buy your work, whether they would have chosen to or not. If you're not happy with how much money is coming in, then your next big step is not marketing—getting interested people to buy—but advertising, which is the art of reaching more people in the hopes of locating your next patrons.

But that's a whole other topic.

In Review...
If your twitter stream contains statements like these:
I feel like I'll never make it... why can't I seem to sell enough?

...you are in stage one. Save your bitterness and doubt for your confidants and move on.

If your twitter stream contains mostly statements like these:
This next album is going to be awesome! It's writing itself!

...you are in stage two, and are entertaining people who are already your fans while occasionally putting off people who aren't. If this is what you can manage most days, you're in good shape.

If your twitter stream contains stuff like this:
Good morning! How are you all today? You've been asking me for more stories about CharacterName, so I'm working on a story about him right now!

...then you've successfully moved the focus to a balance between yourself and others, and you're doing great. Keep it up!

Remember: we are all custodians of our economic ecosystem, and that means both spending our money wisely... and selling our art in a way that respects our patrons' humanity. If you keep your focus in the right space—the one between you and your customer—you'll find it much easier to avoid the pitfalls of the used-car-salesman approach to marketing. And with that, we conclude the September column! I hope we've given you some insight on how to market yourself in a way that feels good to both you and your potential patrons. Tune in next month for more cartoon jaguars, and as always, feel free to tip if you're so inclined!

If you prefer to send physical money, you can email me for my address at haikujaguar at gmail.

Time Management

2010-08-16T08:19:00.002-04:00

Inevitably any advice column on running your own business will edge toward a topic that that seems to prey on everyone's mind, a topic I avoided for a long time because so much has been written on it I had no idea what I could add. But then, inspiration struck! And so this month, the three jaguars take on... time management!

Those of you familiar with previous Three Micahs columns might expect this topic to be a shoo-in for the inner Business Manager. In the past, I've talked about how Business Manager is in charge of budgeting, both money and time. In fact, most time management advice you find in magazines, blogs and books reads like dialogue straight out of inner Business Manager's mouth, with tips like:

1. Reclaiming lost time: how to comb your day looking for spare minutes and turn them into productive hours.

2. How to re-arrange your schedule to turn those spare minutes into bigger, more useful chunks of time.

3. How to find creative solutions to your time budgeting problems, like trading services with friends so you can work while they watch your kids, or you can cook while they find time to paint.

Which is all fine, fine advice... if you're already motivated to work. But let's face it. The problems most of us have with time management have nothing to do with process, technique or minutia. They have to do with attitude. With desire. And you know what that means.

It's time to say goodbye to Inner Business Manager:

...and say hello to the person in charge of the emotional aspects of your work life:

That's right. To really succeed at time management, the person you have to consult is your Inner Artist. Because the central tenet of time management is this simple: If you really want it, you will find the time.

Hey!
I know that right now a lot of you are bristling because (like me) you have been told over and over again that there's something wrong with you if you aren't willing to work hard at stuff you want. We place a high value on productivity in our culture, and we are absolutely tyrannical about punishing laziness. As a result, a lot of us frantically choose something, say to ourselves, 'this is it, this is what I'm going to be good at or interested in', and we spend years of our life bashing our heads in trying to accomplish it. The alternative (being seen as not doing anything at all) is better than trying and not succeeding. Maybe along the way we convince ourselves that we really do want what we're trying to do, or we invest so much time in it that we're afraid of back-pedaling and losing all those years.

But what applies to the Day Job applies to your creative life too. There's nothing wrong with figuring out what you really want to do with your time and doing it. Both on a macroscopic level—say, wanting to be a painter—and on the microscopic—like working on a particular project. And most time management problems begin at the microscopic level.

The Two Big Problems
In general, there are two problems that prevent us from making use of all those excellent Business Manager-like tips on time management.

"I'm... So... Bored With This!"
Maybe you were excited about it when you started. Or maybe you were never excited about it. Whichever applies, the fact is: the thing you're working on no longer inspires the Inner Artist, and when the Inner Artist gets bored she rarely reports in to work. You can try whipping her or bribing her, and sometimes that gets you somewhere. But art is about sharing something that moves you with the world. If a project no longer excites you, why are you torturing yourself finishing it? Choose something new and work on that instead.

But wait! you say. Lots of things excite me, but once I start them, I lose interest! I want to finish something!

A good point! But while I'm a big fan of self-discipline, nothing greases the wheels like being interested in what you're doing. If you really want to finish that languishing project, here are some ways to find the passion again:

1. Re-read/look over your original notes for the project. Put yourself back in the headspace that conceived the idea. What excited you about it then? Is it still exciting? If not, is there a way to adjust the project to touch on themes or styles that are currently working for you?

2. Consider whether your approach to the project is the problem. Maybe you started a story as a novel, but it makes more sense as a short. Or the comic strip really needs to be a graphic novel. You wanted to do a steampunk costume but can't find the energy to finish it; do something radical with the rest of it, like changing it from a woman's dress to a man's coat tailored for a woman (or vice versa).

3. Go to your audience. Maybe you've forgotten all the reasons you wanted to finish something. But if you shared it with a friend, a critique group or some of your fans, they might be able to remind you. Tell them your interest is flagging and give them a chance to share their enthusiasm with you. Ask them to check in with you or ask you questions about it periodically.

Did any of these approaches work? If not, there's a second problem you might want to take a look at before you give up and move on:

"I'm Never... Ever... Going to Finish This. So Why Bother?"
An extremely common reason we lose interest in projects is the oppressive feeling that we will never complete them. If you can't see the end of the journey, it gets a lot harder to keep slogging on when the going gets tough (or boring). Whether we like it or not, we are wired to want the dopamine hit of accomplishment, and some projects are so tedious, long or difficult we feel we never get it. If looking at what you're working on makes you feel despair or apathy, or like you can't ever imagine what it will be like done, this is the problem you need to address.

1. First, if you've been tracking your average completion time on projects as I suggested in the Metrics column, drag those figures out now. Pluck out the figure that applies to the type of project you're working on now—say, 30 hours to finish a song—and post that figure somewhere. Figure out how many hours you've logged on the project so far and tell yourself: "Hey... on average, I finish stuff like this in 30 hours, and I'm 10 hours into it. Another 20 to go!" Time yourself and keep going.

2. If you don't know how long your project usually takes—either because you haven't started time-tracking, or because you've never done anything like it before—don't despair. Have a look at where you want to end up: with a finished song or skirt or puppet or novel. Separate the project into discrete steps. "I need three verses, probably. A chorus. Two bridges." Or "I need to do the eyes, model the face, sew on the fur." Or "I need this character to end up here. I need a climax. I need some kind of ending." Once you do that, put up a "map" of your destination. Plan to reward yourself for reaching each discrete step.

3. Once again, appeal to an audience for help: a friend, a critique group, your fans. Not just to cheer you on; get them to tell you how far you've come. Their outsider's perspective might help reset your own, so you can see how far you've actually come instead of just how far you have to go.

Cutting Your Losses
You've tried to excite your Inner Artist. You've searched valiantly for the passion, you've cried on the shoulders of all your friends and fans, you've tried dangling carrots, making schedules, mapping imaginary destinations... and you still would rather play Farmville on your lunch break than work.

It may be time to move on.

But wait! Am I really saying you should give up?

Yes, I am—

—but giving up is bad!

...and it's not. Giving up is only bad if the goal you're abandoning is a worthwhile one for you in particular at this point in your life. The project you're failing to reinvigorate may not be the right project for you right now, and if it's not, you not only can give it up, you need to.

Why? Two reasons.

Your time is valuable. Let's be brutal in our candor. Most of us are doing this with what free time we have as it is. We work to put a roof over our heads. We come home, clean, cook, do more chores. The time we have left over has to be split between recreational activities that refresh us, our passions and sleep. If one of the activities you spend your spare time on is art, don't spend it doing something you aren't in love with. You owe it to yourself to work on the projects that excite you, which brings us to point number two:

Your passion is indispensible. If you wanted an activity that could be done on autopilot or through sheer willpower, you chose the wrong endeavor. Art is about passion. It's about working on things that excite you, that move you. It's about communicating that ferocity of spirit to your audience. Whether it's the stillness of a quiet joy, the pinpoint emptiness of sorrow, whether it's whimsy or joy or anger, whether it's your satisfaction at your own skills... the work is empty without you in it. Not all the technical mastery in the world will save a piece of art that has no soul. If you're doing this, your heart belongs in it. So don't waste your time on anything less.

This? This is your ticket to go. Notice that everyone is present to offer it to you. Business Manager knows how much time she'll lose trying to force you to work on something you don't care about. Marketer knows how hard it is to sell something that has no spark of life in it. And Artist... well, Artist wants to get busy on stuff that matters to her. Whether you need to let go of your dead project in steps and mourn it, or whether you can just take off and never look back, here is permission, if you need it.

But wait...!

The Money Problem
Ah yes. And here is the last of the problems. Some of you will have taken money to finish things you no longer care about... or never did. Now you're saddled with a project you have absolute zero interest in finishing. This is the point where a lot of art-business columns will tell you how much you suck for not being a proper business-person. (See above: re: our tyrannical need to punish laziness.) They will harangue you for not keeping to a schedule, for not being able to muster the discipline to power through something, or they will tell you to get the heck out of the business, because you're not cut out for it.

You can go read those columns if you want recrimination. You're not going to find it here. The jaguars know that combining art with business is like navigating a swamp without a map during the rainy season. You don't know where you're going. You're not sure which parts are safe and which aren't. You think you're on solid ground until you try it, and then you discover: nope, you're sinking. There are no easy answers, and no one gets the right to smack someone else with a rolled-up newspaper as if there are.

So let's take care of the immediate problem: you have an assignment to do and you're having no luck with it.

1. Try changing your style/approach. If the parameters of your assignment allow you to play, you might be able to re-ignite your interest in it by doing it in some completely different way. You have to draw a book cover... instead of the approach you were thinking of, try a completely different angle or style. You need to finish a short story for an anthology... ditch your current idea and try a new plot.

2. ...okay, you aren't allowed to change the parameters. You will have to slog through it, if you can. Try the incremental goal technique I mentioned above; reward yourself for every 1000 words toward your goal, or for every step of the painting completed, or for writing one song toward the album. Be sure to stay in communication with your client, especially if you're getting close to the deadline (or particularly!) if you've missed it.

3. Consider backing out, if you haven't spent the money already. Give your client a full refund and your apologies. Don't be excessive or melodramatic; just tell them you've realized you're not a good fit for projects of this type. For extra professionalism and customer care, identify several other artisans who can do similar work (and are professional in habit) and give their contact information to the client.

So, having solved the immediate problem, you have some decisions to make. Was it this particular project that bored you? Or was it taking commissions in general? This is the difference between deciding that you don't ever want to do book covers for anyone, or you just don't want to do book covers that feature vampire lads ripping bodices off goth girls. You need this piece of information to decide whether you can accept money for this kind of work in the future. If it's being commissioned like that you really don't enjoy, consider whether there's some other way to productize your work. (This goes back to my initial column on uncovering what workstyle you enjoy.)

Running into a failure like this is valuable information, and inevitably you buy it dearly. Use it as an opportunity to further your understanding of your strengths and interests as a working artist. As I said above; your time is valuable and your passion indispensible. If you can save yourself upset in the future by admitting that you really just hate working to spec, or don't like a particular segment of the industry, or would rather just work on your own projects and figure out how to market them afterwards... then that's information you need in order to succeed on your own terms.

In Summary
Here's what I want you to take away from this column:

1. Time management starts with your inner Artist. If she's not interested, not all the tips and tricks in the world will help you.

2. Unless you have a pressing need otherwise, you owe it to yourself to work on things that excite you.

3. If you can't finish something, it doesn't make you lazy, stupid or useless. It just means what you were working on wasn't the right thing for you, right now.

4. If you want to make money at art, it helps to find a product that you enjoy doing; taking money to do things you despise will not lead you to a productive, fulfilling working life.

There are exceptions to this, of course. Next month I plan to discuss the role of self-discipline in the life of a working artist, and when it's valuable to do things you don't necessarily enjoy or want to do. But in general, time management is as much a matter of passion as it is about discipline. If you spend most of your time forcing yourself to work or finding reasons not to, then you're not heeding the call of your inner Artist. That's a much bigger problem than whether you can shave ten minutes off your commute so you can spend that time writing.

This concludes August's column! I hope it's helped you consider a new approach to time management, one that takes into account your needs as an artistic professional. As I mentioned, next month we're going to talk about when it's useful to apply self-discipline to your processes. Tune in then for more cartoon jaguars, and as always, feel free to tip if you're so inclined!

If you prefer to send physical money, you can email me for my address at haikujaguar at gmail.

Enlisting the Aid of Your Inner Customer

2010-07-15T12:13:00.003-04:00

One of the most common complaints I hear from people attempting their first business endeavor is "I'm no good at this marketing stuff!" I sympathize with this worry; marketing, as the customer-facing side of a business, is daunting. When we mess it up, we notice: sales are sluggish, clients are few or displeased and stress levels on both sides of the desk skyrocket.

I'm here to tell you, my friends, that inside you, right now! you have a personal trainer for your inner Marketer that will get her up to snuff in no time. She requires no work to find, no money to employ, and she's as merciless as a drill instructor.

The name of this hidden resource? Your Inner Customer.

Every day, you are the target of someone else's marketing and business attempts. Some days you buy. Some days you don't. Some days you are delighted and some days you rage. And every time some telemarketer calls you, a gangly teenager rings up your groceries or some friendly artist tries to sell you a piece of jewelry, your Inner Customer is awake and believe me, she's taking notes.

The Day I Made Formal Acquaintance with My Inner Customer
Long, long ago, I saw a piece of art in a convention art show that really spoke to me. At the time, being an impoverished college student, I couldn't afford the print. But I really, really liked it so I tried to figure out who the artist was and finally found her name by looking at the bid sheet attached to the piece I wanted.

Several years and a Real Job later, I shook out that note and went looking for her on Teh Intarwebz, and hooray! Found a website I could order from. I immediately bought that print and a week later, I received an envelope and tore into it.

...and out came the print.

Just the print, mind you. Not even wrapped in plastic. The corners of the piece were bent from bumps in transit, but luckily it had sustained no other damage.

Bewildered, I glanced inside the envelope... and found nothing else. No invoice or receipt, okay, fine... those are rare from individuals. But no business card? No pamphlet? No letter! I wanted something more from this transaction. I'd been anticipating buying this piece for years, and there was absolutely no ceremony to the consummation of my quest. Sitting there with the (slightly battered) print in my lap, I thought about what would have made me happy. A letter would have been amazing! Nothing personal, just a 'thanks for buying my print' form letter with a real signature, maybe. I would have been all over a business card or a pamphlet, or some piece of shiny paper that told me about what projects the artist was working on and what I might be interested in buying next. A catalog would probably have been too much to ask (though I would have eaten one up), but... I was really expecting more.

I still love that artist's work, and I can now afford her prices. But I haven't bought anything else from her. I don't hate her and I'm not angry about the product I bought from her. But she failed to connect with me when given a golden opportunity, and because of that I never think to spend my money on her work. I don't remember her when I splurge on artwork; instead, I spend my money on artists I interact with, or who I feel give something to their clients through blogging or similar online presences; or I turn to big big companies like Allposters.com, from whom I do not expect personal interaction but who are timely and produce a high quality product.

The Rule
That day, with that sad envelope, I met my Inner Customer... and she passed on to me the one rule I use when planning any marketing endeavor. I am now passing that rule onto you, to see what your Inner Customer thinks of it. Like most rules of thumb, it's pretty simple. And here it is:

As a businessperson, do the stuff you wish other businesspeople would do for you.

...that's it.

Applying the Rule
So how do you go about applying the rule? You have something you want to sell... imagine that you're someone who might be interested in buying. Ask these questions:

• How would I find out about This Thing? How do I like to find out about things like this? Do I hate receiving email? Do I notice ads? Is it reviews that move me? What if I'd really really like a thing, but no one's reviewed it yet... what would make me consider it anyway?

• What makes it convenient for me to buy Things like that? Do I prefer credit cards? Do I like sending money in the mail? Do I hate fussing with Paypal? Do I dislike working directly with people? Do I even really want to think about it? What would make it painless for me to part with my money?

• How do I like to be treated while considering whether I want to buy it? If I am treated courteously, would I recommend this merchant to someone else who likes this stuff, even if I decide I don't?

• How do I like to be treated while buying? What do I want the merchant to do for me? What kind of courtesies surprise and delight me?

• How do I want to receive my product? Do I want it wrapped? Can it be damaged? Do I want customer letters? Care instructions? Do I want additional marketing materials? What would make me feel like the vendor either 1. cares about me personally, in the case of small businesses, or 2. looks like they know what they're doing, for big businesses?

All of which is very abstract, I know. Fortunately, imagining yourself as the recipient of your own services isn't the only way to employ your Inner Customer. You can also start recording how other people treat yours.

Negative Experiences
Whether or not negative experiences are more frequent, one thing's for certain: we sure do remember them better. So turn your blood-pressure-exploding moments into useful data by writing down why you were mad. Don't stop there, though! Write down two additional things:

• What would have prevented you from getting mad or upset? How could the business, the employee or the owner have changed things so that you would never have run into this problem?

• How could the business have appeased you after making the mistake?

So, for instance... that time the business shipped you the product and it showed up in multiple pieces. You were angry, of course... you paid for it and it's broken. You note they could have prevented the break from happening by packing it better—write that down, "always pack products carefully." But now that the thing is broke, what can they do to "make it right?" Negative customer experiences (Marketer Micah says) are always opportunities to go the extra mile to show a customer you care about their experience (because you do; it shouldn't be a lie). If you called the business and reported your broken product and they apologized and shipped you a new one, would that be enough to soothe your upset? What if they apologized and sent you a new one and a coupon? Would that change your feelings?

Case Study
I remember buying an art supply: a little bottle of fluid with an applicator. When I received it and attempted to use the applicator, it tore off. Perplexed (and disturbed, as it had not been a cheap art supply) I called the 1-800 number on the packaging, which was answered by... a real human being. Immediately. In fact, the owner. A little startled, I reported that the applicator had broken; with the distracted air of a mad genius, he asked me for the product code and proclaimed "That was my last model, I've improved the applicator since then. What's your address, I'll send you the new one!"

So I gave him the address and he mailed me an entirely new bottle, just like that. I have since discovered that I don't actually need that product... but whenever an artist says to me, "I need masking fluid," I bring out this long story, tell it enthusiastically and send him to the product's website. A negative experience was transformed by the business-owner into a positive one that now brings him advertising. That's what you want to aim for as a business-person... so pay attention when you are upset by a customer experience, and always take notes about how you could have been made to feel better about it...!

One final note on negative experiences: they don't have to be about anger. Disappointment or feelings of let-down are just as important, as in my example with the artist shipping me that print. Any time your Inner Customer's response to something is to sigh and say, "Oh well," or "ho-hum," bring out the questions! Why are you bored? What would excite you?

Positive Experiences
Yes, I know... it's quite rare to be delighted by your interactions with businesses. But it does happen. Sometimes it's just a faint relief, like "wow, that was easier than I expected." And sometimes, oh rare and wonderful sometimes, it's "OMG THAT WAS AWESOME."

Always take notes when something makes your Inner Customer happy. Sometimes it's quality. Sometimes it's competence. Sometimes it's the little things. But there are many ways to make a customer happy and you're not going to be able to think of all of them. Start building a file now on things that businesses have done that make you not only happy, but want to patronize them again and recommend them to others.

Case Studies
I use Clear Bags for my artwork. I remember vividly when I decided to start selling posters and realized I needed something I could ship rolled-up posters in. I browsed the Clear Bags website for half an hour, growing more and more distressed, until at last I picked up the phone and called them and rambled incoherently about what I needed.

The employee on the other end of the phone got me to measure my posters. He got me to measure the posters when they were rolled up. Then he set out three different options for me that he thought "might work," and then decided that wasn't good enough... he went back into his inventory stores, got out samples of each of the products he was recommending, and measured them on the spot to make sure they could take the diameter he had determined himself would be average for my posters. And there, on the phone, while I listened to him talking out loud, he finally said, "I think you really want this one, and this is why."

I said, instantly, "I'll take a roll of them."

That's how you make a customer happy.

Another example: when I had more free money, I sometimes used to buy custom clothing. On one occasion, I bought two similar pieces from two separate vendors. One of them arrived shoved into a manilla envelope with an invoice. The other arrived in a box, wrapped in pink and purple tissue paper and ribbons, with business cards, care instructions, a signed letter and a pamphlet. It smelled faintly of roses.

Guess which vendor I still recommend? Actually, no, don't guess. Go check out Morua Designs.

Making a Habit of It
None of this will matter, of course, unless you make a habit of interviewing your Inner Customer. In fact, my recommendation is that you never really "turn her off." Whenever you're out buying things, being afflicted by marketing attempts or interacting with merchants, keep your Marketer present to have a dialogue with your Inner Customer. "Am I enjoying this? Am I at least not upset about it? Was that good? Was that bad? Did I like how that employee treated me? Why?"

Don't stop at general observations; make a special point of observing other artists working in your field. What do they do that delights you? What do they do that annoys you?

I know one artist who writes a blog that is consistently fascinating, thoughtful and utterly focused on craft and art history. I buy his books. Interviewing my Inner Customer, I hear back: "I like people who share their knowledge and are friendly. And I like to think that the people I give money to are hard-working people who are constantly improving and researching their craft."

I know another artist who writes a blog that consistently links to politics that demonize half the population of the country. I don't buy his work. Interviewing my Inner Customer, I hear back: "It doesn't matter whether I agree with him or not. I don't like the lack of respect his attitude demonstrates for people he disagrees with."

The writer who keeps used copies of her out-of-print books to hand-sell to enthusiastic fans who can't find the book anywhere else: that's a great tactic, my Inner Customer thinks, and Far More Awesome than the writer who said, "I'm sorry, that's out of print," and nothing else. The costumer who does custom work, got messed up with health problems, and was honest, apologetic and up front about being behind schedule got my Inner Customer's admiration and sympathy rather than my irritation that she wasn't delivering. The artist who claimed she was poor and then later went on to talk about her shiny new purchases—I wasn't angry at her, but I didn't want to give her money anymore.

This is the kind of information you should be collecting so you can become the kind of businessperson you'd buy from. Remember the rule: As a businessperson, do the stuff you wish other businesspeople would do for you.

Exceptions
No column about a person's Inner Customer would be complete without noting that for every rule there are exceptions. For instance... you might be the kind of person who wants to be left alone while making your decisions, while the person next to you wants a running commentary from a knowledgable employee. You might not want small talk from your shop-keeper; you might find having to make personal connections with someone is just too much energy for you on a common day. A couple of notes, then:

• In some of the cases, you're not going to be as rare as you think. Try satisfying your customers the way you want to be satisfied and see if it works. In many cases, you'll find you'll attract people who'd like your work anyway. Like-minded artists often create work that attracts like-minded people—and shoppers.

• ...if you tried the above and it isn't working... then you need to go observe other customers and see how they react to business-people to compensate for your quirk. This is an excuse to people-watch, which can be uncomfortable... but remember, you don't necessarily have to interview them. You just have to observe them.

Think of yourself as your first customer and design your business practices accordingly. You no less than anyone else have plenty of experience—and opinions!—on what makes a customer happy... so feed that data to your Inner Marketer and see what happens!

This concludes July's column! I hope I've given you some ideas for how to turn your experiences as a customer into knowledge you can use to improve your marketing and business practices. I welcome your comments, so please feel free to discuss your good and bad experiences here... someone else will learn from them, I bet!

Tune in next month for more cartoon jaguars, and as always, use the coffee mug to tip if you're so inclined. :)

If you prefer to send physical money, you can email me for my address at haikujaguar at gmail.

What I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Graduated College

2010-06-15T09:37:00.004-04:00

Long, long ago, in the before-times, this Jaguar graduated from college with a Fine Art degree... in Studio Painting, with an almost-minor in Creative Writing. This degree prepared me for absolutely nothing useful (and in fact, did a poor job at the art stuff also, but that's a different column). I was poised at the edge of the Real World like a child at the edge of a pool, not entirely sure I wanted to dip my toes in. More importantly, I had no idea how to swim.

No one had told me anything about how to make it as a freelancer or a fine artist. Not the business principles I've spent several months discussing in this column, such as profit, revenue, expenses, tracking, marketing, etc... nor even the most basic information like... how you even set up a business, legally.

These days, my alma mater teaches a class in just these fundamentals (entitled, sensibly enough, "Real World"). This column, though, is for those of you who graduated without the benefit of such a class: for those of you who, like young Jaguar, are staring out at the void and thinking, "Um... now what?"

Disclaimer 1: If you went to school to study for a specific job like copy-editor, animator, game-designer, etc... you don't need this column! Go forth and job-hunt, and good luck!

Disclaimer 2: There is no fourth Lawyer jaguar. This column does not constitute legal advice, which is why at the end of it I link actual places you can get legal advice. This is just a jaguar recounting (from her rather ratty notes) what it took to start a business here in Florida. And when I say "Florida," I really mean it. In other parts of the country, your procedure is going to be different. You will have to do the research.

Disclaimer 3: This column pertains to people living in America. I can't speak to other countries, except to guess—no, bet—that anywhere there's a government collecting taxes from people working, there will be paperwork and fees. Yours will just look different.

Paperwork
So, you want to get moving on this making money as a businessperson thing. Here are some of the steps—the ones I remember! They are that Byzantine.

1. If you plan to do business by anything other than your given name, you have to apply for a Fictitious Name. So, Baby Blue Parasols and Brightspirit Creations all have to be registered (which, of course, costs money). Then you have to run an ad in the newspaper for a couple of weeks notifying people of your intention to do business as that name. (Which also costs money.)

2. You will have to decide what kind of business you're running: a sole proprietorship, a partnership, a corporation (and there are now several types of corporation)... and all of them come with different requirements, laws, paperwork and fees. (And no, I can't tell you which is appropriate for you! You'll have to do the legwork and make the decision.)

3. You will need a license from the county (or parish, borough, etc.) to do business. And sometimes, from the city. If you're working from home, you have to make sure your county allows working from home, and if so if your business qualifies as one of the ones allowed (so they can prevent people from, say, slaughtering pigs next to other unsuspecting homeowners who might not like the reek). All these things cost money. Plus, they have to be renewed. Mark your calenders.

4. You need to sign up for another license from your state's Revenue department, so they can collect sales taxes. For the state. You may also have to collect city or county sales taxes.

5. Depending on your company type, you may need to sign up for an employer tax ID number so the IRS can collect your earnings. For some reason, this service is free! Gee, I wonder why.

Fees and Taxes
Having gone through the rigamarole of legally setting yourself up, now you get to... pay more money! (I bet you thought I was going to say 'make money'. Ha!)

1. You will need to collect sales tax for your state (and/or city). Depending on the size of your business, you'll be reporting sales tax between 1 and 4 times a year. If you're late sending it in, you will be fined. (I failed to send mine in one quarter where I made no sales and got fined $50 for making no money. I now tape my slip to my wall in front of my face so I will remember.)

2. You will need to pay federal income tax. Also, there's a self-employment tax levied so that you can pay into Medicare, Social Security, etc. Don't expect a tax return. Tax returns are for parents and people who work for other people.

3. And, in some states, there's a state income tax. In case you thought some of the leftovers were yours.

But wait! There's more!

More Money You Need to Have
After you've given away your money to everyone who wanted it as a set-up fee, and then after you've given away your money to the people who want it quarterly, biannually or every year on a regular basis... you're still going to have to set apart money that you can't touch, because mark me, you're going to need it:

1. You will need to put money away in some kind of savings, because when emergencies come around, you'll be the one paying for them.

2. You will need to put money away for retirement, because no employer will be funding a 401K or pension plan for you.

3. You will need to pay for health insurance. (Trust me. You will be paying for health insurance, no matter what the new health care laws end up decreeing. The only difference is whether you'll be paying it out of your pocket or paying it at tax time.)

But What About Deductions?
Some of you may have heard that if you declare yourself as a business, you can handwave some of your bills. Contrary to nebulous rumor, a business doesn't get paid to buy stuff. Deductions allow you to detract the cost of something you use in your business... from the profit you made that year, for the purpose of reducing the amount you pay a tax on.

So if you make $500 a year, and would pay the IRS income tax on $500, but you spent $50 on supplies... then you pay the IRS taxes on... $450.

As you can see, this only puts money back in your pocket if you're making enough money to be taxed, and even then you can't reduce your tax burden past the amount you've made. If you make $500 a year and spend $1000, the government is not going to send you any money. Though wouldn't that be nice. :)

Don't take my word for it:
I encourage you to investigate the legalities of doing business yourself. You will have to; my lists above are only guidelines based on hazy memories and should not be used as a checklist. Where you live will determine what hoops you'll have to jump through. Here are my suggestions for places to find all the information you need:

• Small Business Bureau. Somewhere in your town the Small Business Bureau is running a Development Center to answer your questions about how to properly set up in your state. If you're serious about starting your freelancing business or just want to ask detailed questions, contact these people first.

• An Accountant. I encourage you to find a local accountant, preferably one who knows something about freelancing or art, and make an appointment to have him/her walk you through the process of remitting all the money to all the proper places. The accountant will also be able to answer your questions about deductions, expenses and the fine print of your Profit & Loss. You'll need to have a working understanding of all these things, and the best person to give it to you is someone who does it day in, day out.

You might never use this person's services again (and it can cost between $50 and $300 an hour depending on where you live), but this one appointment is important. Make it, take notes, get a business card in case you need help later.

• IRS Website. At some point you'll be swimming through the circulars on this site, so best bookmark it now.

• An Artist's Group. Preferably Local. Most towns will have one or more groups dedicated to working artists. Some of these groups will be useless, full of unherdable cats who can't even attend their own meetings... others will be an amazing investment, with seminars, classes, contests, forums and legal help. The only way to figure out which is to go have a look. I encourage you to stay local, or to at least find one local group in addition to any national ones, because local groups will be hooked into face-to-face opportunities and local grant/government/legal issues that you'll want or need to stay on top of.

• Other Artists. Similarly, maintaining a network of other artists at different points in their careers can help you keep track of problems to come and problems you haven't noticed yet. Someone selling at a fair in another state might warn you that you need to apply for a license there to report sales tax, for instance, or an artist more successful than you can tell you what provisions they've had to make when their volume hit a certain level. And it's always good to help people just starting, if you can: pay it forward.

• The Library... has an entire section devoted to running a business, from the very broad (running a business) to the very local (starting a business in your town) to the very specific (art marketing or freelancing opportunities). Go forth and browse! You're paying for it, after all.

The Legal Alternative to a Business
If all this sounds like too much trouble for the amount of money you're making, there is a legal alternative: you can declare your art a hobby, and list any income you make at tax time that way. As you might expect, reporting hobby income requires knowledge of... more tax law. For instance, declaring a profit for too many years may turn you into a business in the eyes of the government. Plus, you may be subject to self-employment taxes depending on how much profit you claim. And the laws governing deductions for hobbies are different from those for businesses. If you're making money at all, you'll have to become acquainted with the legalities... there's no getting around that. You can read more on hobbies at the IRS website, or you can make that accountant appointment to have someone walk you through the particulars.

Some of you will decide that you never want to go through the trouble of running your own business (or accepting any money at all!). There's nothing wrong with that. There are many days that I don't want the trouble. What the government calls your art-making activities for the purposes of taxing it have no bearing on what the art means to you or how seriously you take it. You can be skilled, passionate, talented and prolific and not accept a dime, so don't let the IRS's labels discourage you.

...So What I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Graduated College:
Get a Day Job. (Find the Right One.) Use your spare time to hone your skills. Use your extra cash to buy reference materials and get extra tutoring, take classes if you can. Build a body of work. If you'd like to make money, then start selling your work and report your hobby income. Learn about marketing and business basics. When your sales start looking very healthy—where 'healthy' means 'I can pay all those fees and bills and taxes and put away money for all that other stuff besides'—then you're ready to declare yourself as a business.

As with every other part of running a business, starting one is complicated and requires attention to detail. Don't jump in before you're sure of the waters... and yourself.

That concludes June's issue of the Three Micahs! For those of you who are considering art as a money-making activity, I hope it gives you some notion about what it takes to start out. Join us next month for more cartoons, and as always, feel free to tip the jaguars if you're so inclined!

Accounting Spreadsheet Download

2010-06-06T10:14:00.003-04:00

Several of you requested a spreadsheet template so I cleaned mine up and annotated it. The spreadsheet below is an Excel 97-2003 format xls file that should be usable by MS Excel and Open Office. It has five worksheets: a Summary sheet to help you keep a high-level view on where you are; Expense tracking; Revenue tracking; Customer listing; and I threw in (just for kicks) my Layaway tracking sheet.

My personal version has extra sheets for tracking things like e-book sales but I left those out to keep it as broadly-applicable as possible. If you have questions about any particular cell, check the right-hand corner for a red flag, that should give you a tool-tip if you hover. Feel free to modify your download any way that works for you (and if you think your modification is particularly clever, please, tell me about it!).

Here's the file:

Jaguar-Accounting-Template.xls

This download is free but I did spend some time preparing it, so if you feel so inclined, please drop me a tip. The three jaguars thank you! And please, link this around if you think it will be helpful to others.

Metrics, Part 2: Trending

2010-05-21T06:53:00.003-04:00

This week we continue with Part 2 of Tracking and Trending, in which we use our statistics for the powers of good! If you missed Part 1 on Tracking, start there. The rest of you, rustle up your lists, spreadsheets, post-it notes and databases. Tell your inner Artist she'll get to put her apron back on and have fun later, it's time for some number-crunching!

Trending
So, you've set up a system. You're tracking money, time, people and products. What now?

Now... you look for patterns.

Let's say you've written a novel, a short story and an article, and all of them sold (lucky you!). First, you look at your Money statistics.

Novel: $5000.
Short Story: $250.
Article: $100.

From this perspective, the novel looks like the clear winner here. But we're not done with our statistics. Let's move on to Time.

Novel: 183 hours.
Short Story: 4 hours.
Article: 16 hours.

Wow, big difference here! So let's whip out the calculator and divide our Time by our Money. Doing that, we get a per-hour figure:

Novel: $27 an hour.
Short Story: $62.50 an hour.
Article: $6.25 an hour.

So, the short story actually gave you the greatest bang for the buck. But we have one more category to have a look at, People.

Novel: 20,000 copies sold.
Short Story: 50 downloads.
Article: 5,000 circulation.

And now... we don't know what to think. If we want to reach the most customers, the obvious choice is the novel, with the article as the runner-up.

But wait, jaguar! You were going to tell us how this was supposed to help us. How is confusing ourselves going to accomplish that?

Business Goals
Your key here is that you need to establish long-term and short-term business goals. Most of us will have 'make a profit' as a long-term business goal (and usually a specific amount we want to aim to earn a year). But to meet that long-term goal of profitability, we need to keep an eye on the issues that are preventing it. These problems will inform our short-term goals. Let's have a look at some examples.

Example 1: It's Simple

So you have a problem: you're not making enough money. Step one is to identify the nature of the problem, so you whip out your statistics.

Checking the Money category, you see that your expenses are higher than your revenue: you're spending more than you're earning. From that list you see the majority of your expenses involve traveling to fairs. You flip to the Revenue side of the sheet and start flagging all the sales you've made at fairs and see that you don't make enough at these fairs to cover your expenses. Double-checking your People list, you see that the customers you've gotten at fairs are mostly one-time buyers; you've only gotten one or two patrons from your efforts there. You don't see a lot of your advertising material walking away at these fairs, indicating that you're at least advertising effectively.

So your problem: you spend a lot of money to attend shows that neither make you a profit nor seem to result in broadening your customer base. Axe your show schedule for a year, spend your time on other projects and see what that does to your bottom line.

Example 2: It's Complicated

Once again, you're not making enough money, and a look at your numbers. You see that your biggest expense involves traveling to fairs, so you check your Revenue...

...and your Revenue numbers indicate you make a lot of money at fairs. Most of it, in fact. Double-checking the People side of the equation, you see that you've found all of your patrons (except one!) at these fairs, and you're giving away a lot of advertising material. When you look at the Time statistics, you see that you spend a lot of time preparing for these fairs. You run the time-versus-money numbers and discover that it still looks good: the sales made to your patrons offset the cost and put you in the black.

So... your #1 expense is tied to your #1 profit-making activity, but you're still not making money. What's going wrong?

You settle down with a list of your other projects and run the time versus money on them. You discover that in almost every other arena you're spending way too much time to make almost-to-no money. When you check the customer listing, you see that these efforts have resulted in almost no customers acquired.

Your problem, then? You're spending too much time on activities extraneous to the ones that are really making your money. Spend a year doing nothing but shows (and expanding into new venues) and see if your profit number starts climbing.

But you don't have to use the numbers to troubleshoot problems. You can also use them for planning. For instance:

Example 3: Tooth Explosion

Things are looking pretty good for you when your dentist pops the bad news: that stabbing pain you've been mainlining aspirin for is an abscess. You need a $2000 root canal. You can cover some of that from your account, but you need to rustle up a good $500 of it, and soon, before your stomach lining bleeds off.

You check your statistics. Your goal is to find an activity that has earned you the most money for the least amount of preparatory time. Scanning the lists, you see that you have two possibilities. Posting a sale will often get you around the right amount of money in return for printing, packing and shipping time... you can do that. Or you can sell off a single original, which will get you around the right amount of money if someone wants to buy it. Flipping to your customer list, you see that several of your patrons haven't bought anything in a while, so they might be interested in something; in fact, you have (thoughtfully) notated next to one of them that he's always wanted the original for one particular image you've never sold.

You drum your fingers and think. The sale is going to take a lot more time to organize and manage, but it has a greater chance of making at least some return because it draws on many different people. The original, if you can sell it, will take care of all your problems immediately, but it will depend completely on whether one or two people are willing to buy. Plus, you're not sure you're ready to part with that particular image.

The post office is on the way to the oral surgeon. You start putting together the sale.

Example 4: Small Ponds

You're not making a bad living, but you're concerned: a lot of your money comes from the same pool of customers. If the economy dips too much, you'll take far too big a hit to your profit if those handful of customers see hard times. Since you're doing okay now, you decide it's a good time to start spending some time and money on broadening your customer base.

You check your People statistics and see that a lot of your customers seem to have come from local gigs. Checking the time and money ratios, you see this is somewhat costly, but it's worked for you before. You decide to spend some time researching new local gigs and checking for openings at the ones you've played before—you have a list of those already, with addresses and phone numbers. But you're concerned that you may already have used up the local market, so you decide it's time to expand elsewhere. You have almost no statistics on playing outside your immediate geographical zone, so you set aside a couple of days to do some research.

You find a few possibilities: there's a topical podcast you can try approaching, which will take only a few minutes for the query. There's an interesting new website that re-prices songs based on number of downloads, up to a cap you set: that looks especially promising, as for very little effort you might get some new listeners and a little money. And according to your spreadsheet you have a few patrons who are authors... you decide to ask them if they'd like to use a song for a book trailer, to see if you can reach some of their audience.

All these endeavors will take time, and even if they make a little money they probably won't make enough to offset how much you'd earn by working on new music. But you decide that broadening your audience is more important to your long-term business goal of maintaining profitability than any short-term profit you'd make using the time some other way.

As you can see, keeping these metrics can be a powerful troubleshooting tool. But you don't have to use them solely when your business is failing...

Making a Habit of Tracking
To troubleshoot your business, you need to know how it's doing... which implies that you're keeping an eye on it. So how often should you check your statistics? And which ones should you be checking? Everyone's answer is going to vary depending on their personality. Some of you will find it tedious and want to touch it as infrequently as possible; some of you will find it fascinating and probably end up messing with it every week. Whichever camp you fall into, I would tender these suggestions as baseline:

• Accounting. Don't put off entering your sales and expenses. The longer you wait, the more work will build up and soon enough it will become a paperwork monster that you won't want to beard with a four-foot sword and a fully automatic Red Stapler of Doom. Keep your accounting manageable: record sales and expenses as you make them, or at least weekly.

• Profit-Revenue-Expenses. Check this at least monthly to see how you're doing and to make course corrections. If your profit is plunging, you don't want to wait half a year to notice; you want to use your statistics to try to identify the problem and fix it as soon as possible.

• Big Events. If you attend a large event, do the numbers as soon as you get back so you can see whether it was worth doing (and if it wasn't, how much you have to make up).

• Customers. Check this a few times a year to see if you've secured any new patrons so you can make plans on what special offers or thank-yous you'd like to make. At very least check once in fall to prepare for holiday sales and card exchanges.

Depending on your business, you'll find statistics you'll want to track for your own needs, edification or amusement. Some of you will track number of reviews, others newspaper mentions, some of you books sold per month. Don't be afraid to strike out and measure something seemingly frivolous if it's going to help you. If tracking the number of rejection letters you've gotten over the course of your career spurs you to submit more work, by all means, track the letters!

When Statistics Meet Reality
But wait! Doesn't all this measuring, planning, pattern-matching assume an ideal world? That you'll sell every book you write, that the gig you did last year will be as lucrative when you return this year, that everything will be the way it was before (or better)? Is that realistic?

In short: of course not. In the real world, nothing is certain. Statistics can help you predict your success, but there are no guarantees. Having said that, though... you have to start somewhere, and historical data is a good place to begin. It's certainly better than making blind guesses in the dark. Accept that sometimes you're not going to make the expected sales, the trends will backfire in utterly unexpected ways or the plan you were planning on won't pan out. Make contingency plans and keep going!

As with everything relating to your art business, getting a handle on tracking and trending is going to take some time... but the results aren't just rewarding, they're necessary to your success. I hope my two-part column on metrics has helped you come up with some ideas on how to apply business analysis to your work. Join us next month for more cartoons, and as always, feel free to tip the jaguars if you're so inclined!

Metrics, Part 1: Tracking

2010-05-15T07:02:00.003-04:00

During one of my Day Job stints, I was asked to put together metrics so management could gauge the performance of our technicans. Specifically, they asked for a Mean Time to Repair figure; they wanted to focus their performance objectives around shortening the length of time it took to fix customer issues. Obediently I went out, collected statistics and started generating graphs that were posted every month on the call center wall.

The result? MTTR started trending downward... and customer complaints skyrocketed. Management's decision that time was the sole indicator of success caused our technicians to close tickets as fast as possible, even if they did a poor job of fixing the issues. Quality went out the window, but at least we were delivering bad customer service really quickly!

Success in business is not a matter of a single measurement. Like my poor call center colleagues, you can flog yourself with a single metric and still end up failing. As the joke went in the department (and everywhere else I did business analysis and performance reporting), you get more of what you measure for, and what you choose to measure often defines—and limits—the parameters of your success.

Art no less than any other concern benefits from proper tracking and trend analysis. In this month's installment of the Three Micahs, we will cover what kinds of things you can track to avoid limiting yourself or failing to spot important problems or opportunities; and then, a week later, we'll discuss how to use those statistics to keep a thumb on the pulse of your business.

Tracking
The four major categories you want to track in order to understand how you're doing are Money, Time, People and Products. As you settle into your groove as a working professional you may find other (often more specific) categories, but as a baseline, you gotta have these four. Let's have a look, then.

Money.
The most obvious of our categories is money: money in (revenue), money out (expenses) and profit (revenue - expenses). That means we want to know how much money people have paid us for our art; much money we've spent to make, market and sell our art; and whether the former is greater than the latter. Compiling these numbers will give you a narrow but implacable view of your bottom line: are you making money or losing it? And by how much?

Please note! You must be absolutely rigorous in your money-tracking. If you have a friend who's willing to be your agent to a specific show "for free," but in reality you will end up buying him lunch or making him cookies, then you keep that receipt or that grocery bill. Your "free" trip to that show might actually be costing you $10-20.

So, the basics of what you should be tracking for income:

• Date. Should be everywhere, on everything.
• Price. This is the amount you charged the customer.
• Actual Amount In. Some portion of your sales will be subject to sales tax (and you should know which, and how much you pay based on country, state and county). Similarly, depending on how you were paid, some of your money will get eaten by transaction fees: merchant fees to accept credit cards, commissions, Paypal surcharges, etc. You absolutely must keep track of these things or they will erode your earnings out from under you.
• What was it for? What product did you sell, or sell a piece of? Was it a print? An original? A song download?
• Who bought it? Customer name goes here! More on customers later, under People.

As you develop your business, you might find additional things to track. For instance, I track the type of payment, with the possibilities being "donation," "payment," and "layaway." This helps me see how much of my business is based on straight sales of merchandise versus tips versus people buying items on plans.

Basics of what you should be tracking for expenses:

• Date. You get the idea on this being on everything.
• Amount out. Again, this is what you paid to buy whatever it is you need.
• Actual amount out. In some cases, you should be able to get state tax exemptions. Look up your local laws or talk to an accountant about this.
• What did you buy? Be both general and specific: put in a category for the expense and detail what it actually was.
• Where did you get it? Where you bought it, in detail enough that you could find the place, call them or use them again.
• Tax Categories. It will save you time come tax-time if you look up the expense categories for your country/state's income tax and tag each expenses as it comes in.

Good Idea: Save your receipts and invoices! Proof of transactions is handy. Keep a file folder or enveloped labeled with the year and stuff all your receipts in it. It will probably make your life easier to have separate folders for expenses versus income (sales receipts and invoices).

Time.
Creation (the Art Side). Contrary to what movie montages would have the general public think, we know that making art takes time. Sitting down and pushing a painting from sketch to completion may be the work of 40 hours, spread over several months; completing a novel might take us six months of writing an hour a day. Polishing a piece of music, putting together a piece of jewelry, sewing a corset or stuffed animal... from the moment you sit down to work to the moment you get up and call it a day, you should be logging how much time you spend. Literally: right now, go grab a pen and paper and jot it down. Or make a spreadsheet. Keep a database, whatever works for you. Note not just the time, but what you were working on.

Important: don't log the passage of time, log the exact working time. If you spend six hours on a piece of art over two weeks, write down the six hours, not the two weeks.

Your goal, measuring your work as an artist: to have a record of how long specific projects take you, and to be able to estimate in the future how long similar ones will take you.

Marketing and Selling. Preparation for sale also takes time, whether that preparation involves framing, editing and mailing to an agent, recording a studio version or boxing your work up and mailing it somewhere. When we go to fairs, gigs, conventions and gallery openings, we are spending "time" on our business. When we hike to the post office to mail things, spend an hour on the phone with a client solidifying details for a commission, or lose a frustrating evening to an attempt to fix a broken tool, we are spending time on our business.

This is a place a lot of us trip. Logging your time-per-project is a lot easier than logging your time spent on marketing and selling... but logging your marketing/selling time is critical. Every hour you spend preparing your work for sale is time you aren't spending making art, so you have to make it count—more on that in our Trending segment next week.

Your goal, measuring your work as a marketer: to know how long it takes you to productize anything, so that if you run out of something you can immediately turn around and tell the next customer, "I can get that to you in [x] days." You also want these statistics later so you can decide whether a specific product based on a piece of art is worth your time.

People.
Your third tracking category involves people, a category we can split into two halves. First, your paying half: your visitors, your customers (people who buy from you once or twice) and your patrons (people who are consistent buyers of your work). And second, your networking half: business contacts.

Paying People.
You'll notice immediately that separating your audience into Patron, Customer and Visitor categories requires you to know how often they've bought from you and whether they were looking... not necessarily an easy statistic to gather. In fact, visitors may be the hardest statistic to pinpoint. You can make some educated guesses at it by tracking website hits, offering guestbooks at physical locations, or collecting comments from people on websites or fan emails... but those really are estimations, and you're never going to be completely sure how many people glanced at your work somewhere. Even if you count out a stack of (say) 50 business cards and postcards and set them out at a fair, counting them when you go home will tell you how many people were interested enough to take one, but not necessarily how many people came in and had a look.

(I do recommend that you never send out advertising materials without counting them, and requesting that the remainder be packed and sent back so you can gauge interest.)

So your goal with customers is to get visitors to give you their names (or some evidence of their interest), and then to convert them into customers, and perhaps later, patrons.

What you need to know:

• Who They Are. Your first sale should net you some basic information on your customer: name, address, email address, possibly phone number. That's enough for the one or two-time buyers. Once people start edging into patron status, the amount of information you have on them should increase. You should make an effort to get to know them and their interests: have they mentioned that they'd like to make costumes out of your fashion design? Did they tell you they wore your necklace to a charity event (and what charity was it, if they said)? Did they mention giving your book to their kids? Do you even know how many kids they have? You have a relationship with patrons that requires more reciprocation on your part. You should be able to send them birthday greetings (with a coupon) as well as contact them when you complete a work that meets their tastes. Which brings us to...
• Buying Habits. What are your customers buying? How often? Do you have a customer who only buys your memoirs and eschews your fiction? Or a patron who'll pick up every $5 postcard you offer, but doesn't buy larger prints (don't knock this: $5 adds up over time!). Do you have customers who never spend more than $20 per item? Or customers who never buy unless you're offering a sale? Which is also related to...
• Crossover Customers. If you do multiple kinds of work (say, you're a writer-jeweler), do you have clients who buy both your writing and your jewelry? Or are your audiences mostly separate?

Networking People.
You head out to a convention, get invited to a party, and end up chatting with some senior art director, who hands you a business card. Later, you send email with a portfolio to that art director... who refers you to her assistant. Who signs you up for a big project.

Keeping track of business contacts is important. They come in two sorts:
Possible Contacts. Someone tells you about someone who works as an editor. You find an agent's business card at a local gallery. You look up a list of reputable business managers and take down some names and numbers. Possible contacts are people you haven't met but that you'd like to. You should always keep an eye peeled for people with whom you could pursue a business interest to your mutual advantage, hoping to turn them into...
Personal Contacts. That senior art director you were sharing a beer with. A distributor one of your mutual friends introduced you to. An editor you shared a convention panel with, and hit it off with. Personal contacts are people who might remember your name if you contact them with a proposal.

Some things you should track with business contacts:

• Basic contact information. Name, business, email, physical address and phone number if you have it. Preferred method of address: if you overheard that Marketing VP Elizabeth prefers to be called 'Liza', put that down somewhere. Likewise 'Ms.' versus 'Mrs.' and yes, gender too; some names are androgynous and you probably don't want to be making that mistake. Scratch that. You definitely don't want to be making that mistake.
• How You Found Them. Card picked up at some art show? Convention party?
• Projects You Pitched Them. Keep track of anything you've run by them, and whether they got picked up or not. This will give you a sense for the health of the connection: do the two of you have similar tastes? How likely is it that a new project sent their way will result in something concrete?

Important Note! Business contacts are no good to you unless you use them. While you shouldn't be pinging someone with an inappropriate proposal, like sending an art director seeking abstracts your newest representational portfolio, these people are in business: they're looking for opportunities, just like you. You should not be shy about sending them a query if you've got something they might be interested in. Here's a clue that you're being too shy: in your head, you hear the words "this might not exactly fit the letter of what they're looking for," "they probably have too many people submitting things" or the king of all BAD:"I don't want to bother them."

Burn those words out of your brain. You do not have the kind of personal relationship with your business contacts that would require you to fret about bothering them. (Unless they become good friends. Later.) This is what you owe them: politeness. Professional behavior. They may respond with an equally polite and professional 'no' to your proposal. This is not the end of the world, it won't burn your bridges with them. Regroup, keep moving, and if you come up with something that looks like a match for that person in the future, try again.

You are not chasing unicorns here. And even unicorns would be less fussy.

Products.
Finally, very finally: Products.

Why finally, when arguably Products are the basis of our business? Exactly because they are the basis of our business. They're going to show up on our Money tracking lists, associated with incoming money (or outgoing, for supplies). They're linked on our Time lists with creation and marketing. They show up again in People associated with customers who were interested in something and business contacts you might have used to advance them.

In short, your Products are intimately tangled with every other statistic in the group.

So, basic things you should keep track of with Products:

• Art the Product is Based on. If you write a story, the story name goes here. (How you sell it, as a physical novel, as a download, etc, goes in a different category.)
• Type of Art. If you do more than one kind of art, typing your project is essential. A writer might go with novel, short story, article, poem; an artist-musician with painting, album, song, etc. You will have to experiment to decide how this category will help you, even if that means later going back and re-tagging everything you've got records for.
• Type of Product. As discussed thoroughly in Many Roles: Products, your piece of art is not a product. Make sure you note what kind of product is selling so you'll have statistics about, say, whether posters sell better than postcards. Label anything that you sell discretely, whether it's a single-song download or a sketch.
• Dates. While the Time category will tell you how long it took you to finish something, it probably won't be telling you when you completed it. If you have any substantial body of work, knowing which products you issued in 1997 will probably be helpful.
• Location. If your work results in physical objects, knowing where you put them is helpful. Non-physical objects can probably be indicated by location on your hard drive.

Real World
If you're looking at this list of things to keep track of and thinking, 'Cripes, I'm going to miss something!' I have something to tell you:

You're absolutely right.

This is a lot to keep track of, particularly when you're starting out. You'll probably fall down on entire categories of statistics. The important part is to get back up and keep hacking at it. Maybe you'll be great on time estimation and really shabby at keeping track at people; maybe you'll remember the customers but not your business contacts; maybe you'll get the creative-time-per-project down before you get the marketing-time-per-project. At least you're getting something. As you get to be an old pro with the statistics you're comfortable with, branch out into the ones you've been neglecting. Eventually you'll get it all under control. Which brings us to...

A Note on Tools
You'll notice that this article is not going to link to (or even suggest) you use specific tools to get the job done. Many people will prefer spreadsheets, some will want specialized financial software and still others are going to find an artist-specific package that meets their needs. Some of us will even do what I did one dumb day and write a web database application for it... and others are going to eschew computers completely and decide the best way to track things is with colored post-it notes on their wall.

Organizing your business records is not a minor topic, and is often very individual. I would encourage you to experiment with several different record-keeping methods until you find the one that works best for you. I find it handy to have the kind of sorting/math tools that come with a spreadsheet, but if you find it more intuitive to use a leather-bound ledger, absolutely do so. As long as you keep your records meticulously, the method doesn't matter. Some methods might entail more work on your part come time for trend analysis, but they can still do the job as long as you have the numbers.

And as always, be open to new tools. As your business grows or changes, your recording tools might have to change with it.

This concludes the Tracking segment of our column. I'll post the Trending segment next week, which should give you time to start sorting through your records and coming up with some lists of your own! I encourage you to do so; that way you'll have some real data to play with as we discuss analysis of our numbers. Tune in then for more cartoon jaguars!

Cartoon Originals Now For Sale!

2010-05-03T18:12:00.002-04:00

If you're interested in owning your very own piece of original cartoon business jaguar art, I'm now maintaining a list of cartoons for sale here: check it out!

I'll update the list as I illustrate more columns. :)

The Day Job, Part 2: Pragmatics

2010-04-24T14:17:00.002-04:00

So, having discussed the philosophical reasons why thinking of the Day Job as the opposite of Art is bad, let's move on to some pragmatics.

Mindsets for Success
First, unless you have a secondary passion (say, you feel strongly about libraries and would be happy being a librarian), resist the urge to treat your Day Job as a career. Your family and peers may accuse you of lack of ambition if you aren't scrabbling up the corporate ladder, but you only need as much money as keeps you comfortable. There is no dishonor in flipping a burger if you do it well and come home ready to dive into your other projects. Seriously: don't lose sight of this or you may find yourself CFO of some random technology firm working 90 hour weeks, wondering what happened and how you ended up here. Your object is not money for its own sake. Your object is a little financial stability and a reason to get out of the studio.

Second, think of your day job as a choice. Most of us aren't used to this idea; when you're down to your last penny you're not supposed to choose, you're supposed to take what you can get. Allow yourself the radical notion that you should look for the job that's right for you. You might not find it immediately, but don't give up experimenting until you've found the one that works.

Finding the Right Day Job

Everyone's right Day Job is going to be different depending on the art you do and the workstyle that suits you. I can't tell you how to find that Right Job. I can, however, enumerate a couple of common pitfalls:

• The Day Job That's Too Much Like Your Art: You draw. You take a job as a graphic artist. You spend all day at the office drawing what other people tell you to... and come home not wanting to even look at a piece of paper. If this is your problem, find a day job that has nothing to do with your art!
• The Day Job That Leaves You Physically Exhausted: You spend ten hours a day restocking shelves. You come home, faceplant and wake up the next morning to do it again. Art requires some physical energy. If this is your problem and you can't cut back on your hours, it's time to look for a new job.
• The Day Job That Leaves You Mentally Exhausted: You spend all day behind a retail counter dealing with irritating customers. When you come home, all you can do is watch TV and go to bed. Mental exhaustion is just as big a problem as physical. If you can't cut back on your hours, again... it's time to hunt for some new job.

Some styles of Day Job to consider:
• The Day Job That Gives You Time to Think: If you need time to work out things in your head, consider taking a day job that involves physical labor. You can massage your clients while working out your next story, or do landscaping while pondering that song that just won't come together.
• The Day Job That Gives You Access to a Computer: You can do a lot of useful things at a computer on your time off, even if your art form doesn't necessarily need a computer, like writing. If you end up with a day job that puts you in a cubicle, consider using your spare cycles/lunch breaks to catch up on business emails, do social networking or work on marketing or ad materials. (Phones are another good thing to have access to; pick up a pre-paid card so as not to use your company's long distance.)
• The Day Job That Gets You In Front of People: If you're not good with people and want practice dealing with them, the Day Job that makes you interact with them is a great way to learn strategies for customer care. Every interaction is an opportunity! Take notes!
• The Day Job That Gives You Ideas: If you're low on ideas and want to bulk up on them, consider finding a way-out-there job, something you'd never think to do. Work as a medical transcriptionist, a legal aide, a travel agent. If you can't think up a weird job like this, head to the library or local bookstore and consult their career section: there are entire books dedicated to jobs you might not think of, everything from wedding planning to manning tollbooths.

Some Examples
Day Jobs are as varied as the artists who work them. I've known an actress who worked as a nanny, a job that allowed her more freedom to schedule auditions; a musician who did data entry at home so he could sleep in after long practice sessions; an office assistant who wrote short stories during her lunch hours. I've met three visual artists who worked at framing shops so they could borrow the equipment after hours to frame their own work, at least two jewelers who owned or worked at bead shops, a part-time barista who was attending art school on the side and more people than I can count who worked 8-to-5 jobs in cubicles so they could afford to experiment with things that may or may not pan out.

Above all, your #1 strategy: if the job isn't working for you, start looking for a new one. This Day Job is not your career. Your goal is to make enough money to free yourself from some (or all) of your financial anxieties and to get out of the studio... not to chain yourself to a miserable existence. Remember the mindsets: I am not my Day Job, and I am allowed to choose the work I do. Arm yourself with these realizations and keep looking until you find the right fit.

But Wait!
Am I saying that all Day Job problems can be solved by... finding a new one?

Why yes. I am.

But wait! That's crazy! Not everyone can just up and find a new job!

You're right. And sometimes we'll have to stick it out in jobs that we dislike because of a monetary situation we can't yet resolve. But our problem is that we become comfortable in that routine. It gets hard to find the energy to look for something new. We get used to the idea of being trapped.

The moment you start thinking that, you close the cage door on yourself.

As artists, our calling is to make art. This is our passion, our purpose. Our Day Jobs are sidelines. We can't afford to be attached to them if they bar us from our purpose, which means we have to be ready to let go of them if they get in the way. If you find yourself mired in a Day Job that keeps you from working, but that you have to keep for practical reasons, you have only two choices: find a new one, or learn to work despite it. Both these choices are hard but you have to make one of them, or you'll renege on that joy that is your birthright. Never let go of the possibility of finding a new Day job. And if you can't...

Your Story
...then it's time to write your story. The one where the world tried to crush you and you didn't let it. The one where you triumphed against all adversity to eke out one or two pieces of art when you had a spare moment, because to not do so would be giving in. And you don't give in. Ever. Not if it means giving up the art.

If you're trapped and there's no way out, if your quest for a different job isn't bearing fruit, if you have no other choice, the only choice you can make is to be the Artist Who Didn't Let the Bastards Grind Her Down. Turn your anger and resentment into power and use them for fuel. Bring a notebook small enough for a pocket with you and jot down ideas in stolen time. Skip lunch to write. Stay up late after everyone's asleep to get in ten minutes of work before you collapse. Do it again the next day because ten minutes day after day adds up. Tell yourself the story every morning you wake up: "I'm the hero who can't be kept down." Tell it to yourself until you believe it.

(And then, find a new job the moment you can.)

Addendum to the Story
...did you notice that the Story is another mindset? Training yourself to succeed, to think of yourself as someone with choices, to think of your Day Job itself as an asset to your art... all these are the most powerful tools you have in your arsenal as an artist. All the time-management strategies in the world, all the coping tactics, the plans, all of them will come to nothing if you don't have the mindsets firmly in place first. With the right attitude nothing is going to stop you. Without it, you'll only get where you want to go by accident... if you get there at all.

The Personal Micahs
Manning a help desk taught me the importance of self-control (boy howdy, was that a story!) and gave me a chance to develop a customer "face."

Working in web design taught me how to make my first website. And then my next. And my next...

When I went into process analysis and development, I learned how important processes are to efficient workflow, and took that knowledge to my workflow as an artist.

When I did business analysis, I learned things about trending, tracking and statistics that are serving me even now as I do marketing for my art.

Working in Product Marketing taught me about customer care and how to deal with faulty products and botched customer relationships.

Inventory control gave me the opportunity to experiment with project management and the importance of annotating and filing everything.

Becoming an editor at Graduate Studies gave me a chance to practice handling sudden gluts of work, exposed me to the breadth of people's ideas, and allowed me to take classes for free, resulting in a lot of drawings about medical ethics.

My work as a massage therapist gave me endless fodder for blog columns, illustrations and observations about people.

My stint as a technical writer taught me the importance of brevity in communication, which led to my first flash fiction collections.

Giving up all my Day Jobs for parenting has already changed me so much I can't begin to enumerate the things I'm learning, and all of them are affecting my work as an artist.

I have never had a Day Job that didn't teach me something I couldn't turn around and take to my art, even the ones that sent me home physically and mentally exhausted, even the ones that slowed my production down to trickles. I'm hoping that the philosophies and mindsets I've discussed in these past two entries will help you find something of value in your Day Job too... because the truth is that most of us will need a Day Job for part or even most of our lives as artists. But we're not defined by the "hobby" that pays for our real jobs, and if you take away anything from the Three Micahs on the Day Job, that's the message: you will always be an artist, no matter what you do with the rest of your life. Count on it.

That concludes our columns on the Day Job! Next month we're going to take on trending and tracking, so if you have any questions now on the topics of what data you want to keep, how you keep it and how to make sense of it, send those along or leave me a comment. And thanks for reading!

The Day Job, Part 1

2010-04-15T08:43:00.001-04:00

Mirrored on Livejournal

Sometimes I think all of us artists are born with That Dream. You know which. The one where we live in a golden studio or quaint cottage and do nothing but create. In That Dream, we wake up whenever we like, drift to our computers and guitars and paper and pass the day in a gentle fugue, creating as inspiration takes us. At the end of the month, money appears magically in our bank accounts and bills pay themselves, the better not to disturb our delicate artistic processes. If only we could achieve this dream, we think… we would finally be content.

We cling to the Dream as we slog through a dreary and mundane world where we have to work other jobs to pay those bills. We define our success as artists by whether we can realize it.

…and in so doing, we destroy ourselves.

Yes, you heard me right. The Dream is unrealistic and it fosters an attitude that sabotages us as artists. Day jobs aren’t evil. They are not signs of failure. Believing that it must be one thing or the other—doing art or being a “wage-slave” or a “corporate drone”—is a false dichotomy. It’s time to let it go.

FIRST: Reality
Let’s begin by killing the sacred cow: our fantasy about being a full-time artist. When we move to full-time artist status, we don’t leave the work world, we simply change venues. Art becomes our work.

And oh, what work it is. Money doesn’t appear in our accounts because we decide to devote ourselves to our talents, it must be earned… and we’re the ones who have to go out and convince people to give it to us. We’re the ones who book the venues, investigate opportunities, do the accounting. We pay the bills, curse at our taxes, read the contracts… and then go to the library to check out books on the contracts so we can make sure we understood what we just read. We spend as much—maybe more—time in marketing and finance as we do actually making things… and when we make things we can no longer afford to wait for inspiration. We have to develop ways to deal with the downtimes and power through them.

In our fantasies, a full-time artist’s area of responsibility narrows to a single, manageable task: to do art, the thing we enjoy, that fulfills us. But in reality, a full-time artist’s responsibilities expand to fill all available space, and there is no one else to help shoulder them. We pay our own insurance, issue our own paychecks, manage our own sick and vacation time. And if there’s no money for payroll this month, we’re the ones to blame… and we’re the ones who go home poor.

But wait! You say. What about hiring people to do these tasks for you? Then you really can do nothing but your art!

To that I say: you’re absolutely correct. Some artists will make enough money to afford promoters, publishers, agents, accountants, publicity managers, administrative assistants and a cleaning service so they don’t have to dust their own keyboards. I’m pretty sure you’re going to have to be a rock-star artist to pay someone else to do all these tasks for you so you can concentrate on your art. Do you want to give up art entirely just because you don’t win the fame-and-fortune lottery?

But let’s talk about that whole “concentrating on your art thing.” Because that’s the key to the whole problem.

SECOND: Growth. Ours.
You remember that new author that you thought was so brilliant? Her first book was amazing and you couldn’t wait for the second, and the second was amazing too. You weren’t the only person who thought so… and you were happy when the bio on the back of the book talked about how she was going to start writing more now that she could afford to do nothing but write. The third book was great. The fourth too. But by the fifth book, something was wrong. The sixth was even more lackluster. They’re making her write too fast, you thought. (But wasn’t that the point of her doing nothing but writing? So she could deliver the goods to her fans more often?) Maybe it was that her editors were no longer brave enough to take a red pen to her manuscripts. (But even editors can only work with what they’re given.)

You didn’t buy the seventh book. You picked up the tenth to see if something had changed and put it down halfway through and the words in your head were: “She’s writing the same story over and over again.”

…

That ringing silence? That’s us coming face to face with one of our secret fears. We don’t want to become That Author who can’t seem to escape the same story. The Painter whose work ten years later looks so much like the work he did ten years before that you could buy a single painting and own his entire oeuvre. The Band whose 50-year-old members are still singing songs that were authentic when they were angry teens but sound ridiculous from gray-haired grandparents.

We don’t want to become That Artist. The only way to avoid it is to live a life. Not the life you planned, and not the life of a recluse in a garret. But a life full of bumps, bruises and experiences you might have preferred never to go through.

And the fastest, easiest and cheapest way to get those experiences is a Day Job.

You Have Got to Be Kidding Me
I’m not. I’m totally serious. That your Day Job may give you some measure of financial freedom is secondary to its effect on you as an artist. A lot of people ask me how to stay inspired, how to keep the well from drying up. The answer is right here, right now, in your seemingly mundane life, because something is mundane only as far as we let it be. We are transformers of experience; we are lenses through which the unassuming and the unexamined are illuminated. When you have to get up every morning and go somewhere and deal with people and solve problems and beat your head against stupidity and triumph over unexpected challenges… that’s when you have something to say.

But wait! You say. You have got be kidding. How is that going to be of interest to anyone? My life as a drive-through Starbucks barista? My life in a cubicle?

And to that I say: your life as a barista, a cubicle-drone, a real estate agent, a parent, an inventory manager, a coder… all those things are more interesting than your life as a cloistered artist. Because most people can't relate to your life as a cloistered artist, but a lot of them are going to understand those other things. Your take on them will let them see their own lives in a new way. Maybe a more productive one. And that leads us to…

THIRD: Growing an Audience.
One of the most common patterns I see in the "back-of-the-book" bios of successful artists is an incredibly eclectic biography. These are people who've been long-haul truckers, waitresses, managers; flipped burgers, rewritten process documents, sold antiques; they've been consultants and survey takers and every conceivable job, and a lot of them have done six or seven or nine of them and are experimenting with #10. It's not because they're inherently flaky. It's because Artists are interested in everything... or they can find something about everything to be interested in. And this is the power that intrigues people.

A lot of people ask me how you can broaden your audience, thinking that it's Marketing alone that attracts people, and while it's true that a good Marketing campaign can draw people it's the Artist who will keep them. It's when you broaden your life experience that you broaden your audience: not just the drive-by visitors, but the patrons who'll stay with you year after year. Because let’s face it: the people most interested in a cloistered artist’s life are… other artists. If you want to attract enough people to actually succeed, you need to speak to more than your peers.

An artist who hasn’t lived will be relevant to very few people. It sounds crazy and paradoxical, but the Day Job often leads to success as an artist because it gives you a life to react to and things to say.

Wait, Are You Saying We Should Never Be Full-time Artists?
No, but I am saying that being a full-time artist, in addition to not being like the Dream, comes with an unexpected challenge: you have to find a way to duplicate the unpredictability of a life outside your studio. And frankly, a lot of us can't... or won't. Left to ourselves, we fall naturally onto the path of least resistance. We don’t like subjecting ourselves to unnecessary suffering, to boredom, to uncomfortable situations. We grow accustomed to routine. We like it. And breaking ourselves out of that mold requires discipline and imagination.

It can be done: you can drag yourself out of the office. You can take classes. You can attend parties and openings, do charity work, get involved in the community. You can keep learning. But unsurprisingly, in addition to requiring a lot of energy and imagination to plan, doing these things on your own often costs money. Sometimes a lot of money. The Day Job, on the other hand, will continually expose you to experiences both salutary and frustrating… and make money! It's as if you're being paid to be inspired! And then you can turn around and spend that money on your supplies, or on experiences you actually want to have (like that martial arts class you’ve been eyeing, or that parachute jump that will change your life).

Adjusting Our Attitudes
The modern artist can never be happy. If she's not miserable because she can’t avoid a Day Job, then she's miserable because working as a full-time artist was not the easy Fantasy she was craving. The only solution to this problem is to realize that a Day Job can be and often is a great blessing; and full-time art is not always the right choice (and is never the easy one). Instead of clinging to the dichotomy of Artist-versus-Drone, aim instead for a textured life, one where Day Jobs and Full-Time Art interweave as your financial situation and artistic needs drive you.

But wait! This is all very philosophical, Jaguar. And not at all practical. It's not like you at all!

You're right, and I'm going to talk about the practicalities in my addendum to this column next week; we'll take on managing your energy and your time and other problems common to the Artist at work. But without covering this very important attitude shift, none of it will matter. Your resentment of your Day Job and your persistent feelings of failure will drain you faster than any job ever could. No suggestion will help you if you don't let go of the idea that doing anything but art is awful, like being sentenced to Hell.

Art is not something you do instead of life. It's something you do because of it.

So, having said that... stay tuned for Part 2 of the Day Job!

A Three Micahs Interlude

2010-04-05T17:40:00.001-04:00

I interrupt my work on the April 15th column to present, once again, the Three Micahs... because someone linked a blog post that made it very clear why columns like mine have to be written for working artists. But please don't take my word for it! Go here and read the Writer Beware Column on Questionable Ethics.

Looks pretty straightforward, doesn't it? A reader talks about pirating an e-book after buying the hardcover and a writer says, "This is stealing!" And several other writers agree.

But look more closely at what the reader said:

I bought an e-reader for travel and was eager to begin "Under the Dome," the new Stephen King novel. Unfortunately, the electronic version was not yet available. The publisher apparently withheld it to encourage people to buy the more expensive hardcover. So I did, all 1,074 pages, more than three and a half pounds. Then I found a pirated version online, downloaded it to my e-reader and took it on my trip.

So a reader says, "I want to buy a book, but people are trying to force me to buy it the way they want to sell it rather than the way I want to buy it." And the writer response... is to lynch the reader...?

This is what happens when you leave the Artist in charge of a business matter. None of the writers in that thread said, "Hey! Our publisher is sabotaging our sales and encouraging piracy with business practices that look obviously unfair to our consumers. We should be getting on their case to stop doing stuff that makes readers want to steal our books." Instead, they jump all over their audience because they've forgotten that their publisher is a business partner, not their ally, and they should never be taking the part of a business partner who is preventing them from reaching their consumers.

But wait! You say. Aren't they right? Stealing is wrong! It hurts artists!

Stealing is wrong, sure. And it does hurt artists. But this isn't about the issue, it's about how you go about solving it. Converting a reader's desire to read your book into a sale is a business problem, not an ethical one. If a reader wants the e-book version and your publisher withholds it to force them to buy a hardcover they don't want... how exactly is this good business? It creates resentment on the part of the reader and subverts their desire to support the artist into a decision to look after their own interests, since obviously no one else is.

Heed the cartoon jaguars! Keep the Artist in the studio, where she is productive and positive. Learn to separate the business decisions from the artistic and emotional ones. And most of all, don't let your business partners off the hook if they are getting between you and your audience. A patron who feels strongly enough about your work to steal it is a customer just waiting to be converted if you can find the right strategy.

Why I Wrote "Many Roles"... and Gave it Away

2010-03-20T12:07:00.001-04:00

While writing my three-part series on making money as a creative professional, I had a few folks tell me, "You should be charging for this! Plenty of other people make good money on this kind of advice!"

I nodded agreement... and gave the series away. Why?

(You know what I'm about to say, right? All together now: "The Three Micahs Explain!")

Personal

I know a lot of really creative and magnificent people in a variety of fields who are suffering, often because they don't have ideas on how to manage their business. They might not be able to afford the cost of an e-book or book; they might not even think to pick one up. By posting "Many Roles" for free I gave them the opportunity to consume my observations on making money as an artist and maybe put some of the principles into practice. If even one of those people was helped by my advice, not only does the net suffering of the universe decrease a little... but chances are, they'll be able to continue to create their work, which means I'll increase the net awesome available in the universe for other people to consume.

I like awesome. I dislike suffering. Score! Twice!

In short, I like helping people. This was a chance to do so, so I did.

Professional

...but I also knew that if I gave away "Many Roles," I would get paid for it. My experience with writing for the internet has demonstrated that if I give away content and then ask for funding, enough people will tip me to make it worth my time. The moment I conceived the three-part series, I was planning on that coffee mug tip button at the end and betting that I'd make as much per hour giving it away as I used to make working full-time. I kept track of how many hours it took. I kept track of the money that came in.

I was right. Writing the series, giving it away and then soliciting money for it more than paid for my effort.

But Wait!
Did I just say that I had two reasons for doing something? One altrusitic and one monetary? Why yes, I did. And no, I don't believe the one cancels the other out. In fact, rather the opposite. I believe if you're doing something you love in a way that contents you, there is no friction between the you that asks for money and the you that makes things. It feels natural to ask for and accept money in return for what you're doing, and patrons feel natural (and often happy) paying you.

When you reach that place, there's no dichotomy between "making wages" and "doing what you love." The weirdest thing about it is how not-weird it'll feel. Some part of you will wonder: "Wow, people are paying me for this?? I'm the luckiest daughter of Eve|son of Adam in the world!"

This is the happy-place that I pray everyone can reach at least once in their lives, because there's no boon to society quite like the right person working in the right field, doing something they love. That person will give more to the rest of us than twenty, forty, a hundred out-of-place, out-of-context people ever will.

...But a Caveat
Some of you may read into this that if you do what you love, you will make money at it. And that if you are trying to do what you love and aren't, you're a failure, or I'm indicting you, or I'm wrong. I ask you to go back and re-read the "But Wait" section. Nowhere do I say that doing what you love will necessarily make you six figures... or four. Or even two. My only point is that if you're doing something you love in the right way, in a way that focuses on the joy of doing it rather than flogging it for what it "should" be doing for you... it won't make you feel guilty or strained or like you're taking advantage of people when you receive money for it.

Not all endeavors make money. Not all endeavors make the amount of money you wish they did; or need them to. Sometimes it's a right-time thing. Sometimes it's a right-place or right-product thing.

...but sometimes, it's a right-approach thing. And that's why I'm going to make the Three Micahs a monthly column. Because if there's even a small chance that I can help you find the right approach (Personal), and maybe make a little money of my own doing it (Professional), then I'm going to give it a go. So join me here on the 15th of every month and let's see what we can do together to make all of us a little more successful, a little more content... and a lot more cartooned. Because if you don't love business cartoons yet... I'm going to do my best to change your mind!

Know Thyself (and Have a Plan)

2010-03-20T12:06:00.001-04:00

Pt. 1: Roles | Part 2: Products | Part 3: Plan

In Part 1 of our series, we covered the roles you have to play to run your own business as a creative professional. In Part 2, we talked about two distinct classes of products and how you use them to grow and maintain your business. In Part 3, we'll discuss a Plan, Time Management, and have a look at some case studies.

The Plan
Without a plan, any successes you have are going to be accidental and hard to reproduce. And there's nothing Business Manager and Marketer hate more than accidental, non-reproducible successes. Heck, Artist doesn't like it much either when you explain that she can't eat chocolate or buy art supplies that way.

Creating a business plan for your art career requires something most of us Artists love to do anyway: navel-gaze. So here are some questions you must answer to make one. You'll need input from all your selves to answer these, and you must be brutally honest. There's a niche for every artist, but unless you're honest about your answers you're going to wind up someplace you don't fit and then wonder later why you can't make it work.

1. Do I like working with other people? Do I like getting out and chatting with them, or do I prefer to spend most of my time by myself?

2. Do I like experimenting with other people's ideas or do I prefer to work on my own ideas?

3. Do I work better with deadlines? If so, do I respond to deadlines I set for myself, or only those by other people?

4. How good am I at keeping to a schedule? If I set a schedule, can I keep to it?

5. How quickly do I coast to a stop without something prodding me (other people, external motivators like praise or money, etc)?

6. What kind of things keep me going and where do those things come from?

7. What kind of art do I like to do, and who do I think it appeals to?

8. Do I need a steady, predictable income or can I handle irregular sums at irregular intervals?

9. What kind of art do I like to produce? You can tell this by seeing what things make you happiest to make and what kind of things you make most frequently.

Let's take some examples. Say you hate dealing with people, you really don't like implementing their ideas and you don't really like schedules or deadlines. Your studio is your haven, and you like to withdraw to it and put dreams on paper, beautiful intricate miniatures. If this workstyle makes you happy, drawing a web-comic is going to drive you insane. You should be trying to market yourself as a collectible fine artist and see about placing your work in galleries or selling it online where your interaction with others will be minimal.

But say you love using your skill to explore other people's ideas; you get high on being given a description of something you would never have thought of yourself and trying to make it real for them. You love their gasp of delight when they receive it... you love how it stretches your abilities. If you sit down at a table to come up with things on your own, you inevitably spend days doing... nothing. Your head feels empty. If this describes you, you shouldn't be trying to come up with ways to "think of your own ideas like other people do." You should be doing commissions and illustrative assignments, as many as you can handle.

Put these two artists in each other's work-environments and they will be miserable and make no money. But reverse them and they will be happy and productive. That's why knowing your work-style is so important and why honesty is crucial in evaluating your skills, interests and abilities.

The catch? Sometimes you don't know the answers to these questions until you experiment. Even worse, sometimes your preferences change from year to year. You have to keep on top of the changes by revisiting these questions regularly... or when you're miserable and don't know why.

Once you have described your work-style, you can ask Marketer how to connect what you like to do with how to sell it. Which is... such a huge and varied topic that it deserves its own post, if folks are interested. Suffice to say your marketing opportunities are mostly limited by your imagination and energy level. If you are willing to produce something, there's usually a way to sell it.

Time Management
One of the other major skills necessary to a working artist—or a living human being, really—is figuring out how to manage your time. In Part 1 I described three roles. Even though these roles exist within your same person, they all need time to do their work. Business Manager needs time to do accounting and buy supplies and mail things and go to the bank and organize files. Marketer needs time to do research, analyze trends and respond to customers. And Artist, of course, has to produce art. Somehow you have to slice up the time your single physical body has to meet the needs of the three voices in your head.

Your first task when doing time management is to calculate how many hours a day you have to devote to this pursuit. Be honest about this (you'll notice the repeating theme here). If you could work right up until bedtime, but doing so invariably makes it hard to fall asleep because you're still vibrating, cut that hour before bed and give it back to "relaxing so I can sleep" time. Be honest in the other direction too: if you're serious about this and you currently use your lunch-hour for surfing, then take half an hour or the entire hour back and give it to your business.

Once you have a number of hours per week, it's time to decide how to split your time. There are two approaches to time management.

Static
Using this scheme, you take the amount of time you have and split it into chunks and do the same activities at the same time, every day, every week. You use the first free half hour to answer email and do research. You spend the next three hours producing your art. You spend the last hour of your day doing accounting/running errands. Whatever works for you, but you make a schedule and you stick with it.

The pros of this approach?
• It frees up the mental cycles you'd ordinarily be using for scheduling and gives them back as productive time. There's a reason routine is so celebrated; we tend to respond well to it.
• You can post "business hours." Patrons and customers like knowing when they can expect you to be available. If you can only respond to email once a week, but your website says that you answer email on Thursdays and you stick to that, you'll get a far more positive response than if you try to answer more frequently but erratically.
• Business hours also keep you from burning out. When we get excited, we have a tendency to overdo things. We neglect family or chores or the day job or friends and then wonder why we feel so wasted. If you know for a fact that you stop working at 8:30 PM so you can have family time and wind-down-for-bed time, then you won't run yourself into the ground. Exhausted Artists produce no work.

The cons? This is the most obvious one.

There will be times when the Artist doesn't care what your posted business hours are. She's going to do the work because she's on fire and you're just going to handle everything else while she's busy. Since your business involves sharing this excitement with your patrons, it's a bad idea to step on the Artist when she's burning to work. If you even can. I don't know about you, but mine won't stand down for anything. This leads us to the second approach to time management.

Dynamic
Your other choice is to take your available hours per week and split them according to whatever's going on. If you have a lot of accounting to do, throw yourself at that until it's done. If you have a deadline, put all your time toward that project. If you have an opportunity to go to a book fair or convention to do research, spend your weekend doing so.

The pros to this approach:
• You are far more flexible. You can respond to opportunities and challenges when they happen.
• You can accommodate a very temperamental and inspirational inner Artist.
• You get bored less easily.
• If your workstyle changes or you find your business is flagging, you can change your approach immediately to see if that helps.

The cons:
• You have to spend a lot more time scheduling, which eats into your productive time.
• It's easier to "not have time" for tasks you don't enjoy, which means that work piles up until it becomes almost impossibly daunting.
• You will have a tendency to mistake a problem that would respond to more time by taking time away from it. Many business problems can be solved only by doing the same things over and over again until you reach a critical mass of something: customers, inventory, buzz. If you're used to dynamic allocation of time, you might think "it's not working, I'd better do something else" when the exact opposite approach is necessary.

For some people, a static approach is the only way to go: it keeps them at their desks and frees their mind from the burdens of constantly thinking about when they should be doing something. For others, dynamic is the only choice, because otherwise they'll feel stifled and resentful. For a lot of us, I suspect the best approach is a blend: do a little static scheduling to make sure you do certain tasks regularly, while leaving the rest of your hours more flexible. Your time management strategy might also change as your life situation and business needs change.

Case Studies
So let's have a look at a few people.

The Full-Time Artist

Amalthea likes to make delicate brooches out of antique doilies and collage material in her spare time after work. She loves people and has a broad circle of friends and acquaintances with whom she likes to have coffee. One day one of them admires the brooch she's wearing and asks where she got it. When Amalthea tells her, "I make them," her friend encourages her to sell them.

The idea of selling her work through a dealer or online does not appeal to Amalthea, who likes excuses to get together with people. She also doesn't want the overhead of going to craft fairs or conventions. Instead, she thinks about book clubs and decides she likes the "intimate gathering" model. She rents a room at a local clubhouse, brings her coffee-maker and some baked goods and puts her work on the table, then invites her friends. They get together to talk. Some of them look at the jewelry; one of them buys a brooch.

Within a few months, Amalthea's friends are inviting their friends, who are coming for the coffee and conversation and leaving with jewelry. Pretty soon, she's selling more than enough of her brooches to cover her costs and make some pin money on the side. She thinks about expanding, but finds she doesn't like the thought of losing the intimate vibe of her "brooch salons."

One day an acquaintance asks her advice on putting together a bracelet, and Amalthea is happy to advise her. Her acquaintance is so pleased with her advice that she tells a friend that Amalthea is helpful (and also successful). They approach Amalthea with more questions, which she answers. In doing so, she discovers she likes to teach... and decides to offer classes on jewelry-making. She rents the same room as she did for her brooch salons, but fills it this time with paying students.

Teaching jewelry-making is fun and more lucrative than selling her brooches. Amalthea finds she can quit her day job and do nothing but teach. She still makes brooches for herself or for occasional sale.

In this example, we see that Amalthea has taken stock of (and been honest about) her principle strength: she likes people. Her initial business model takes advantage of that by maximizing her exposure to them; not only does this sell her work more effectively by letting her speak for it, she also enjoys herself. Her initial outlay was high: the cost of renting the room and feeding her friends, along with materials for her jewelry. But she was able to see that returned because she played to her strengths. It also allowed her to spot a new opportunity with a higher return: teaching, which let her charge for every person who walked in the door, instead of taking a chance on someone buying something while there. Plus, teaching jewelry-making sells her jewelry by spreading her reputation... and her jewelry sells her teaching, by enticing people already interested in hand-made jewelry to her classes.

The Part-Time Musician

Schmendrick is a quiet man who likes to make music in his attic, alone. He is currently unemployed. He doesn't like performing in front of people, but he is inspired by them; he likes to write music about his favorite stories. He has few friends and acquaintances, but what few he has are steadfast and true. It's one of these friends who encourages him to make some money off his art, if only to pay the electric bill.

Dealing with people exhausts Schmendrick, so his friend offers to help him set up a website where people can download his music for a few dollars a song. Schmendrick offers some free samples. His costs are low (having already bought his musical instruments a long time ago, and using his computer to make the recordings), but he also makes little money. The thought of marketing himself more does not appeal to him, even if (as his friend says) he could make more money that way.

But he does like making music based on other people's work. So he decides, hesitantly, to contact a few of his favorite writers and ask if they're interested in him writing music for their stories. Most of them don't get back to him, but one of them sends him a delighted email. They begin a collaboration that results in a new novel from the author and a new album from Schmendrick. This album does well for Schmendrick, since the author's fans check him out. It works well for the author too, who loves the music and gets a lot of marketing material for free... songs he can use for book trailers, or play on podcasts. He decides to work with Schmendrick again.

Schmendrick enjoys this experience so much that he tries contacting a few more artists and authors to see if they're interested in collaborations. This time he mentions his previous collaboration with Author X... which brings him a few new artists willing to work with him. Pretty soon, Schmendrick is doing work with several artists and authors and enjoying himself immensely.

His friend encourages him to try playing at conventions where these authors attend. Schmendrick agrees to try, but he finds the experience stressful and does not want to repeat it.

A while later, Schmendrick finds a day job. He waffles over whether to take it, since he is making some money on his music now and could possibly make more. But he decides he doesn't like feeling the pressure to make art or starve, so he takes the day job and continues to work on his music on the weekends.

In this example, ruthless self-evaluation allowed Schmendrick to avoid some of the pitfalls of working as an artist in modern society: he was very clear about not wanting to deal with people or become a marketing or business expert. He liked doing a very specific kind of work: collaborations with other artists that let him write songs about stories that mattered to him. He did not like public performance or over-booking himself. So he made arrangements that allowed him to do this, and when given the choice between continuing to do it that way or trying to grow it as a business concern, he chose the former. This is not an easy decision, but sometimes it's the only decision.

. o O o .

Having a plan, figuring out how to allocate your hours and responding to changes in yourself and your environment requires as much creativity in many cases as making art. It's also the place that most artists trip up. You really have to identify your strengths, your weaknesses and what you're willing to do if you want to do business as an artist; self-deception leads to misery and failure. Often the reason artists lie to themselves about their strengths and weaknesses is because they've been told there's only one way to make it as an artist... but there's not. Each path to success is as individual as the person embarking on it, and only when you've been candid about what you're good at and what you're not can you find the path to your happy-art place.

That concludes Part 3 of my series! Having written it, I feel like I've left out so many things. I probably could get a biweekly column out of Ask the Three Micahs and not run out of material for a year. But first...

(Click to drop a coin in the cup!)

If you liked my "Many Roles" series, please feel free to tip me! (People who dislike Paypal can contact me at haikujaguar at gmail to get a mailing address for checks or money orders.) If you are short on money but long on connections, link me somewhere: Livejournal, Twitter, Facebook, your blog, wherever you make your internet home. Each entry now has links to all three parts of the series, so you can start at Part 1 or just link the entry you liked best.

I hope you enjoyed the series. Suggestions, comments, questions, all welcome. :)

Edit: And since some of you have asked:

This Mug Not For Dipping Brushes Mug
by mcahogarth at Zazzle.

Stardancer Home.

Products

2010-03-20T12:05:00.001-04:00

Pt. 1: Roles | Part 2: Products | Part 3: Plan

In Part 1 of our series, we covered the roles you have to play to run your own business as a creative professional. In Part 2, we'll talk about two distinct classes of products and how you use them to grow and maintain your business.

Definitions
First and most importantly: what comes off the Artist's desk is not a product. A new painting is not a product. A new story is not a product. These things are turned into products by the Marketer, who targets an audience, packages it to appeal to them and then finds ways to sell it to them.

So, the new painting is not a product. But the prints that the Marketer sells to people with budgets for fine art reproductions are. The original, which the Marketer targets at people who are looking to become fine art collectors is. The downloadable wallpaper that the Marketer posts for free "but tip if you feel inclined!" is. A short story is not a product, but the story sold to a magazine to reach its audience is. The short story repackaged as a serial for blog readers is. The same short story offered as an incentive, included in an omnibus as new material is.

The Artist produces stuff. But that stuff is not a product until the Marketer decides how best to sell something based on it. Your Artist should never be thinking about how to sell her stuff because she's bad at it. Not only that, but if she starts fretting about how to sell something before she's done it, one of two things will usually happen: 1. She'll stop up completely and be incapable of working, because she doesn't actually want to do things she thinks are "sellable;' or 2. She'll start producing drek she doesn't really believe in and then pitch a fit when nobody wants it, because nobody wants to buy art from someone who's faking it.

Don't let your inner Marketer tell your Artist what to do, either: her job is not to force the Artist to produce something to meet existing demand, but to create demand for the Artist. If you're doing what everyone else is doing, you are replaceable. If you make it clear to people why what you're doing is cool and special, then people will come to you for your kind of cool and special. They might choose to spend money elsewhere one day, but it won't be because they can get what you make anywhere, it will be because something else will have become more valuable to them.

That's a pretty short summary of the business of productizing your work; we could probably spend several entries discussing some of these topics (and if you have questions, please ask!). But for now let's move on to the two major categories of products.

. o O o .

New Work
What is it? I define new work as art that neither the Artist nor the audience has seen: the Artist because she hasn't made it yet and the audience because it doesn't exist.

Why do it? I'll let the Three Micahs answer:

In short, you need new art to keep your Artist happy: she needs to improve her craft and work on things that are exciting her, because chances are if it excites her it will excite her audience. Audiences like to see an artist creating new work because they like to feel invested in artists they like, and they don't want to dump energy into an artist they feel is winding down in their career.

New work gives your Marketer potential new products to package on a regular basis, which allows you to grow your audience through frequent (and predictable) updates/releases.

But wait! you say. The Artist isn't producing work predictably!

Of course she's not. But the Marketer isn't selling your art, she's selling the products she bases on your art. So staggered releases (original first, prints next, wallpapers a month later) give the Marketer something to sell at predictable intervals even if your Artist isn't producing regularly. We'll handle what to do if your Artist isn't producing regularly enough for even the most creative inner Marketer in our next section.

Meanwhile, the Business Manager is happy because new work = new opportunities to make money. You can't make money without something to sell. People are more likely to spring for new work because they haven't seen it before, and because new car smell is very exciting. We all like to feel like we're in on something at the ground floor. Plus, if we're an existing fan of an artist, we've already consumed their existing products... we want the next thing.

Examples
Art: Putting a new painting for sale in a gallery.
Writing: Releasing a new short story as a serial online.
Music: Offering a new song for download.
Crafts: Stringing a new necklace and offering it for sale on Etsy.

. o O o .

Existing/Old Work
What is it? I define existing/old work as work that the Artist has seen: they've already produced it; and that your audience may or may not have seen. Some of your older fans will have. The new fans won't. Some old fans will have seen it but won't remember it.

Why do it? The Three Micahs return!

I mentioned above that there will be times the Artist just isn't producing enough new work for the Marketer to sell at regular intervals... or for the Business Manager to pay the bills. In that case, it's time to haul out work the Artist has already completed and were never productized, in which case the Marketer gets to work figuring out how to package them for sale. Or, it's time to haul out work the Artist has already completed, the Marketer has already sold a few times... and recontextualize it, packaging it either to market to new fans or to interest old ones.

But wait! you say. Isn't that dishonest? Trying to get people to pay twice for something they've already bought once?

Maybe if that's what you're actually doing. But remember, your art is not the product. How the Marketer sells the art is your product. If you package the same piece of art in a new way, a way that adds new value, then you're not being dishonest, you're just offering a different option to people who've already seen it (and a new option to people who haven't). They can choose whether that new version is worth more money to them.

The Business Manager likes selling old work because half the work (the Artist creating it) has already been done, and she can make money on something for only half the effort (the Marketer re-packaging it). The Marketer likes it because she can fill in the gaps of her product line schedule, plus she can get new fans to pay for work that was new before they came on board. But inevitably revisiting old work bores the Artist, who longs to be working on something that has set her on fire. Even if the Artist is currently without inspiration, she's going to resent returning to stuff she feels she's grown out of or past... something we'll address in the last section. But first, some examples.

Examples
Art: Cutting up old prints that haven't sold into bookmarks or pieces for sale to scrapbookers.
Writing: Finding old stories published in several different magazines or anthologies and collecting them as a single themed volume.
Music: Licensing an existing song to an author for use in their book trailer, or to someone for their Youtube video.
Crafts: Shortening necklaces that haven't sold into bracelets that can be sold for cheaper.

. o O o .

Incentivizing
Yes it is a word, and I'm not afraid to use it! As I mentioned above, your Artist longs to work on things that set her on fire... and if she isn't currently on fire for something, she kind of would rather not work at all. Not on new things that have lost that new-love luster, not on old things that she secretly hates because what she can do now is soooo much better.

At this point, you have to learn what secondary motivations compel your inner Artist. Most Artists have at least one primary motivating force, the mysterious drive responsible for them suddenly tearing off for the nearest tool when an idea strikes them. But when that fire dies, a lot of Artists can be nudged by other forces, none of which are as powerful but which can at least keep the momentum going.

Common motivators include:

Reward. "If I finish this, I'll go to the local sauna|get a fancy cup of coffee|play a game for an hour."
This is the most basic form of motivation, and while it works it's loaded with pitfalls: for one, you might get so used to working for rewards that if you don't have them you might feel unmoved. Also, rewarding yourself for every milestone can get very expensive, eliciting dagger-glares from Business Manager. If you want to reward yourself for your efforts, try to keep the rewards small, non-monetary and infrequent.

Audience Interaction. "If I finish this, people will say nice things about my art and that will make me feel warm and fuzzy!"
This is a great artistic motivator! It's cheap and it works, often when nothing else will. The problem? It's almost completely outside your control. You can create a climate where people feel encouraged to comment, you can remove obstacles that prevent them from commenting, you can commit yourself to responding to them so that they'll feel more inclined to begin a conversation in the future... but if the art doesn't speak to people, if they're not feeling up to it, if they just didn't happen to be online or in the presence of your work that day... no comments. And if you get too used to comments or conversations with your audience, when you don't get them you tend to take it very personally, and what was a source of warm-fuzzies becomes not just a null, but an actual detriment: you might become too discouraged to work.

Nevertheless, I think we're all moved by that connection with our audience, so whether we can get it as often as we want or not, it's going to be an intrinsic part of our lives as artists.

As an aside, helping inspire your audience to interact with your work more is not as simple as it sounds, and is probably a topic for a different post. >.>

Money. "If I finish this, I will make some money!"
In our current culture, we grow up soaked in the belief that money = validation, so if you're feeling really low you can use money as a reason to keep working. But as with Rewards, this can lead to real heartache down the line. People don't buy artwork for many reasons, not just because it doesn't speak to them. If you train yourself to believe that the only yardstick by which you measure an artist's worth is how much she makes, you are going to crash and burn emotionally the first time you hit a lull in receipts. You might be tempted to lower your prices to lift your sales and your flagging self-esteem, an act that will come back to bite you later.

If you do use Money as a spur for your efforts, be sure you keep your inner Artist separate from your inner Business Manager. Imagine your Business Manager telling your Artist, "If you finish something, we might have a better chance of buying more chocolate," rather than having your inner Artist adopt the mantra, "If people pay me, it means I'm good."

Tools and Inspirations. "Maybe if I get a new tool, go through some new books, I will feel more inspired!"
For some people buying a new tool or thumbing through other people's work or reading a book or watching a show on something exotic and unknown to them is enough to get moving again. While this can lead to spending too much money ("oooh, a shiny new box of pastels!") or procrastination ("just one more show on ancient Egypt!"), it's still often healthier than some of the other methods. Just enlist the aid of your Business Manager ("How much money am I allowed to spend?") and go for it.

The Chance to FIX THINGS. "Oh I hated how that old picture came out, maybe if I do it at my current skill level it won't suck so much..."
Most Artists are secret perfectionists who are never happy with the way something came out... or if they were then, looking back at it a year later makes them want to burn it with fire. A great motivator for that inner perfectionist is to give them the chance to fix old mistakes: revisit old pieces and try to improve them directly, or start from scratch and try to do better justice to the idea. This motivator costs nothing but time you would have spent anyway... and it also directly impacts skill level by encouraging your Artist to work at the limit of her skills.

You'll note a lot of these motivators are riddled with pitfalls and problems! But all of them are healthier than some of the other ways Artists motivate themselves: guilt ("I'm not working hard enough."), jealousy ("That other artist is more successful than me!"), envy ("That artist doesn't deserve their success because I'm better than them!"), anger ("I'll show those people who think I suck!") and self-hatred ("I suck. I need to work harder so I'll suck less."). All these negative motivators lead to corrosion of the spirit and often, a halt in work altogether. Appall your inner Business Manager with one mocha too many before you give in to any of these voices. You might never break even, but at least you'll save your soul.

. o O o .

This concludes Part 2! In Part 3, we'll cover creating a marketing strategy, time management and case studies. If you missed Part 1, which covers the three roles in more detail, you'll find it here.

The Three Micahs: Many Roles

2010-03-16T12:22:00.000-04:00

Pt. 1: Roles | Part 2: Products | Part 3: Plan

It took me almost two decades to figure out the reason I've always run my art/writing activities as a business—even when I haven't needed the money—is that I enjoy being a business-person. It's hard work, it's maddening, there are a thousand little details to track... but I like it all, even the fussy bits. So I've decided to unpack some of that knowledge to you in the hopes that you can use it.

This entry is Part 1 of 3 in a series entitled "Many Roles" about being a business-person in a creative field. In this post, I cover the three basic roles: Business Manager, Marketer and Artist. Artist can be taken to mean any artistic endeavor: writing, craft-making, singing... whatever you're trying to make money on. Veterans of larger companies will note that I've folded Sales into Marketing, which is a personal bias. -_-

Without further ado, then, the Three Micahs!

When running a creative business, you have several roles, all of which have responsibilities and work modes. I name these the Business Manager, the Marketer and the Artist, and have detailed them below.

Role: Business Manager
Primary Workmode: Practical and Administrative
Your Business Manager self needs to channel an inner Virgo (if you have one): meticulous, data-focused and completist. This is the self that makes lists and does chores and says, "Uh, no" to things like "Can I buy a crazy-expensive thing that we can't afford." Since I don't have an inner Virgo, I think of the Business Manager as my inner Parent; they both say 'no' a lot. -_-

Duties
• Accounting
The primary duty of the Business Manager is accounting: tracking expenses and revenue and calculating profit. That means every time money comes in, you write it down, and every time money goes out, you write it down... and then you subtract the one from the other to see how you're doing. The Business Manager is also in charge of maintaining lists of customers, tracking layaways or recurring purchases/income and preparing taxes.

• Personnel Management
Your Business Manager self is also charged with time-tracking: this means that you need to know how long everything you do takes, whether it's marketing, creative or your business management tasks. That really does mean everything. Runs to the post office, inputting income, drawing a new picture, researching a new art supply, social-networking, composing blog posts; all of that is a cost of doing business, and you need to record it. The Marketer will need this data to help advise the Business Manager which tasks are more profitable than others.

• Asset Management
The Business Manager also tracks (and depreciates) all your assets, manages inventory and replaces or re-orders necessary parts. This is the part of you that shows up to sort and label all your existing art, figures out if you need to buy a new printer or brushes and purchases another year of your post office box when the rent comes due.

• Process Management
All businesses have processes... and the Business Manager should always be on the look-out for ways to streamline yours. If you spend less time on processes, you have more time to do everything else. Things like deciding to run all your business errands on the same day so that you aren't constantly interrupting your studio time to hit the post office fall under process-management.

• Administrative
This is the Self that goes out and mails out things, deposits checks, packages things, buys pens and papers and coffee.

Facing: Vendor and Financial Institutions
The Business Manager is the one buying things (with a jaundiced eye and a tight fist) and interacting with banks and financial institutions.

Outsourcing Potential: Medium.
You can get people do so some of the work of the Business Manager; it's not too hard to get someone to label things and mail them for you. You can pay for someone to prepare your taxes. This can be moderately expensive, depending on where you are or whether you have access to artist organizations. The cons? A lot of Business Management requires close interfacing with you on a day-to-day basis, or exchange of personal information. Getting other people to help you streamline your processes can be hit-or-miss if they don't know your daily routine or your personal situation.

Role: Marketer
Primary Workmode: Creative and Social
Your Marketer self is the one that spends most of her time thinking about, interacting with or guessing at what other people want. This can be a surprisingly creative process. The first question that she holds in her mind is: "How would I like to be treated as a customer?" (followed closely by "How do other people seem to like to be treated?")... which means you spend a lot of time delighting yourself by figuring out what makes you happy and trying to do that for other people.

Duties
• Trend Analysis
Your inner Marketer is in charge of taking sales, revenue and expense data and using it to figure out which of your tasks are the most profitable. For instance, the Marketer might notice that selling prints at a show takes roughly 20 hours and makes $800 before expenses and $600 afterwards... while selling a single original might take 8 hours, make $500 before expenses and $450 after; this would lead your Marketer to tell Business Manager and Artist at their next meeting: "Hey, stop going to shows and produce more originals."

• Customer Care
The Marketer is also in charge of dealing with customers. She's the one who figures out how to attract them, the one who closes the sale (and decides how to manage the sale process to make the customer feel special) and the one who keeps in touch with them afterwards to see if they're interested in new products. The Marketer's also the one who deals with problems: yours (oops, I was late delivering something I promised: here's my apology and a coupon or free cool thing) or theirs (ack, the post office bent your print, let's discuss what we can do about that).

• Product Management
Your Marketer is the one who develops new products and maintains existing ones. There's more than one way to sell an artist's labor; the art you make is not a product until the Marketer figures out how to sell it. You might choose to license it, sell commissioned work, package it as a book, sell it as prints, collaborate with someone else to create a different item... the possibilities are as endless as your imagination.

• Research and Advertising
When you sit down to update blogs, do social networking, respond to customer queries, enter contests, send work to juried shows, design fliers or contact the local paper to offer an interview, it's your Marketer who's doing the work of advertising. She's also the one charged with research to see what your peers are up to: how are they marketing themselves? What products are they offering, and can they be adapted to your work-style? What's hot now?

Facing: Customer
The Marketer is the one dealing with patrons, audience, customers. You should always have your best face forward for them!

Outsourcing Potential: Medium-to-High.
Of all the roles you've got, Marketing and Advertising can respond the best to outsourcing (in my experience). You can hire people to run and create your website. You can buy books or read blogs that basically tell you what kind of products to sell or how to sell them. You can hire advertising firms, if you're so minded. The problem? It's very expensive. It also means your marketing is less customized to your product and work-style, which can become a problem (more on that in another entry).

Role: Artist
Primary Workmode: Creative and Internal
Nose to the grindstone in your studio! Here's the raison d'etre for the whole business.

Duties
• Creation
Your number one job as an artist is to make stuff. That's probably the reason we all signed up for this, after all. But this is ironclad: you really have to make things. You can't sit in a studio and think about making things. You can't say you're going to make things and never get around to it. You can't make things irregularly. If you're doing this as full-time work, you should be sitting in a chair doing it for most of the day.

• Research
Your other job as an artist is research. Not just what other artists are doing, though that can be helpful. You should be researching your craft (has some new technology come out that's made things easier or better? Is there a new technique you can learn somewhere?). You should be experimenting, both with the art itself and with the processes you use to create it. Your goal should be to develop as an artist, because there's no holding steady. You're either improving or stagnating. Entropy is law in this universe, and you are no less subject to it than anything else.

• Practice
Related to research is practice: you should be improving your skills. This relates not just to technique, but how quickly you can turn your work around. Practice is also the only thing that will allow you to learn to estimate your time-per-project, an essential skill: this will allow you to set realistic deadlines and feed data to the Marketer about how much time it takes for you to create something.

Facing: Internal
Your creative self should be quieter than your other selves when interacting with people; by nature most people's inner Artists are passionate and that passion can often clash badly with your need to be an empathic salesperson. A lot of artists also find that talking about their work gets in the way of them doing it: they lose their interest after discussing it, or they find themselves discussing it as a way to procrastinate.

Outsourcing Potential: Low
Only you can do the work!

***

Now that we've met the three Micahs we're ready to move on! In Part 2, we'll cover Products and how the three roles interact with them. I'll have that up later this week/early next week, depending on when I can put together my thoughts and the little art bits. I hope you're enjoying it so far!

Stardancer Home.

Where I Live Online

2008-12-01T08:41:00.000-05:00

I have too many of these things already.

Livejournal is where I primarily work, as haikujaguar.

I'm mcahogarth at Twitter if you want to know when I'm eating breakfast.

I'm also mcahogarth at MySpace and I'm also M. Hogarth on Facebook.

Finally, I have a ginormous website at Stardancer.Org where you can see over 2900 images in my art database and read about my latest writing projects.

Hope that's enough information for you! :)