crystal and sweet violin (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thelinesoflearning) wrote2014-04-07 08:12 am
thelinesoflearning) wrote2014-04-07 08:12 am
A question about selling creativity.
So hey. People who make any kind of regular money off selling things they can do. Particularly creative things (extra particularly word things), but anything, really. Tarot, coding skills, whatever, I'm sure there are things I can't think of.
How do you beat down the feeling of "I don't deserve to be paid for this, I'm not good enough, there's got to be someone better out there you could get this from"? Or ignore it? Or however you defeat it enough to actually put price to things?
How do you beat down the feeling of "I don't deserve to be paid for this, I'm not good enough, there's got to be someone better out there you could get this from"? Or ignore it? Or however you defeat it enough to actually put price to things?
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I don't expect this will help you but it's all I got. Give samples away, samples are awesome and you are still doing creative things and yes.
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I do tarot stuff. I stick a price of "how much effort this takes for me to do", roundabouts. Other people then get to decide whether or not they want to pay that.
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Yes, that would be my paycheck job. (Plus a couple dollars a month from sales of A Dinner of Herbs, and low-double-digit dollar figures at irregular intervals from my Etsy.) The flat truth there is my whole division deserves to be paid more than we are, even the slackers, even the ones with a high opportunities-for-improvement (read: mistake somebody caught and called them on) rate. (We're being paid like we're data entry clerks, you see. Anyone, the Office of Management and Budget feels, can do a data entry job. But our job description reads more like 'paralegal'.) And I neither slack off nor make many mistakes. But the flat truth is also that I constantly feel I'm not good enough to be paid as much as I am.
The problem with translating that to creative work (my job: so very not creative work) is threefold. One, I believe everyone should do art. More, I believe everyone should do several kinds of art. And a lot of people do, or have done in school, several kinds of art. At least drawing and creative writing. So unlike my job, where people who have a vague understanding of what happens in my office go "I could never do that" (it takes ten weeks of training just to do the "entry-level" version of my job), people (especially when dealing with visual and wordy arts) have this collective impression that "I could do this". Often in the flavor "I could do this better". People are generally not inclined to pay to have done a thing they [think they] could do better themselves.
The other problem is mass production. People are used to seeing a novel for seven or ten dollars, a sweater for ten or fifteen. Ten dollars is maybe twice the price of materials on the lil dinky purse I crocheted yesterday: about eight hours of crocheting; call it six because it isn't fair to count the probably two hours I spent backing up because the damn hook went between yarn strands again. A fair price for that purse from my perspective would be six hours of work at a fair wage plus price of materials (and price of shipping domestic and the cut to Etsy and the cut to Etsy-Direct-Checkout-or-Paypal and a reasonable percentage to be pure profit). Let's pretend a moment that US federal minimum wage is fair: that's $43.50 before we calculate in anything but time spent. I can't be bothered doing the actual math but we're talking over $60 by the time everything's figured in. Ain't nobody paying $60 for a lil dinky crochet purse. What I can probably actually get for it is...ten dollars. Similarly, divide ten dollars by a hundred-thousand-word novel and people expect to pay about a hundredth of a cent per word. This is reasonable if the wordything is going to sell five hundred copies of which every single cent goes to the artist. (Or at least I assume SFWA's professional rate is reasonable. Five cents a word.) But realistically, in the "Adebowale writes a thing, Badr sponsors the thing, Adebowale posts the thing for Cahaya, Dar, Eun, etc., to read for free" model, the wordything's only going to sell one copy.
Wow, that got wordy. Let me sum up: People do not appreciate the skill necessary to make art. People do not appreciate the time necessary to make art. And a third point that I won't elaborate on because this isn't the place for a politics discussion: People do not appreciate the necessity of paying a living wage for work of any kind, creative or otherwise.
These three points braid together into "what people are willing to pay artists is invariably a lot less than the artist is worth".
Yes, it's discouraging. I freely admit I am discouraged. (As you can probably tell by the lack of
I get around the discouragement by treating all my creative work as a hobby that occasionally gives me a few dollars and as activism that I'm doing on a volunteer basis. But then, I have a paycheck job. I make a living wage. I can afford to treat my creative work as a financial sideline. My approach cannot work for everyone.
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I think my problems run the opposite direction -- it's not "people won't pay me enough", it's "why the hell do I think I'm worth putting a price tag on in the first place, you shouldn't even accept it if I'm giving it away" -- but this is still really interesting to think about, and in context of other people, makes a lot of sense ot me.
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Doing my first crowdfunding attempt for my writing was hard, definitely. I feel like I only manage it when I'm busy enough with other things that I don't think too much.
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