I’m a very creative person, and today, I’m going to share with you some pieces of art that I’ve created over my lifetime and how I have been able to make money from things like this. This is how you can start your own creative based business. 

Did you know that there’s something called the “creative economy”? They’re calling it the orange economy. This is a multi-billion-dollar industry. Why? Because so many things can be digitized these days. Computers can do so much. Artificial intelligence can do so much. 

I always tease my husband because he’s a surgeon. I say that in twenty years, a robot can do what he does and he won’t have a job! However, he also does photography, which is his creative thing. No robot can really take over the creative side of that because it’s in the mind’s eye and creating something unique that people will pay for. 

And art isn’t just limited to things of beauty. That’s not the sole purpose of it. It’s not just creating things to hang on your living room wall. There are so many practical uses for art. There are so many things that companies will pay for in order to use your artwork. Let’s go through some of them. We’re going to be looking at the visual industry, such as paintings, and the book industry as a writer, because those are the two fields that I know the most about. I definitely don’t know a lot about music, and I don’t really know the business end of filmmaking. 

When I was growing up, I wanted to be an author. I wanted to be a great Caribbean, and even global, novelist, and write a really amazing book that everybody would love for ages, and I would become a famous author. But I was discouraged from that at a very early age, because the thinking was that nobody would pay me to write stories. That’s what I grew up with. Now, I think about creativity and business very differently. I don’t necessarily think about who’s going to hire me to do something, but instead I think about how I can create a business from a particular product that comes out of my mind. 

Books

I showed a few pieces of art that I’ve done. I did a bird drawing in 6th form, as well as a shell painting from a sip and paint event. I also did a self-portrait in pastels some time ago, but I did these for a specific reason. I did the self-portrait for a cover of a book I wrote. It’s a book of poetry called Unfettered. The book needed a cover, and I do art, so I did the self-portrait as the cover of the book. So, let’s talk about books a little bit first. 

If you want to write a book, there are several ways that you can make money from it. The most obvious way, that most people tend to talk about, is to find a publisher who will publish your book. What the publisher will do is then pay you. If you’re very well known as an author, they may give you an advance if they believe the book will make a lot of money. At other times, what they will do is give you a percentage of the profits or sales that is generated from the book. 

The other option that you have, if you want to really treat this a business, is to self-publish, which is what I did with both Unfettered and Shades of Red. I wrote these and self-published them in my early twenties, and I thought that writing or creating the thing was the extent of the work. You feel so accomplished after you’ve created this thing, and you think “okay, it’s going to sell!” I didn’t realize at the time, that the bulk of the work isn’t in creating the thing, but in selling the thing and getting people to buy whatever it is that you have created. 

To self-publish is pretty simple. The first thing that you will need is an ISBN NUMBER from your local library service. They do charge for it and that’s basically just the barcode or tracking number that you see inside each book. If you do want physical copies, you will need MONEY IN ORDER TO PAY A PRINTER to get it done. You’ll be able to choose your fonts, what type of paper you want, and other details about how it will look, but you will definitely need some money if you decide to print. When I printed my books, Kindle didn’t exist yet. That’s a whole new format that you can explore now. You can do an e-book and eliminate printing costs. You can also repurpose the same content and do an audiobook. 

Now when I did Unfettered, on the cover, it says CD included. I was ahead of my time and recorded myself performing the poems in this book. I included the CD in a little flap on the back cover of the book. Whenever anyone would tell me that they don’t like to read, I would tell them they can still buy it because the CD is included so they can just listen to the poems on the CD. Also, with both these books, I published them close to the Christmas period because somebody very wise once told me that when a lot of people want to buy, you should have something to sell them, and Christmas is that time. So, if you are a creative person and you have something that you can sell, then use this time to meet the Christmas demand. 

And I’ve been a hustler! So, I told you I did these books in my early twenties and how I sold out 500 plus copies of these books was by going downtown in Belize and setting up a table in a very busy spot. Downtown Belize is very hustle and bustle and very busy, especially during Christmas time. I set up a table and just started selling to people who walked by. People knew me from the radio and the TV, so I did have that going for me. But I literally just hustled and sold more than 500 copies of each of these at about $10-15 USD each. I ended up creating a nice little sum for myself for the Christmas. 

So, you can earn money by publishing your own book. You can do it on Kindle, you can do an audiobook version to be published on Audible, and also by selling physical copies of the book. The next thing is that you can get royalties from any publication that you contribute to. After I published my two books, other publications took note. Stories and poems from my books ended up in textbooks. I have a story in English Stories for Jamaica, Grade 9 Students Textbook and I also have a story and a poem in the textbook The Alchemy of Words: An Anthology of Belizean Literature. I have my work published in these books, and I did get paid for them to use my work in these books, but I also have the ability to collect royalties from this. So, to this day, after more than 10 years, every year I get a royalty check from JamCopy. So, if you ever publish anything, whether internationally or abroad, register with JamCopy. They collect royalties on behalf of all authors, and they distribute them once or twice a year. It usually comes every December, just in time for Christmas. You can collect royalty checks basically for life, based on work that you did just one time. 

That covers books in a nutshell. There’s more we could say on books, but I can go into that in another episode.

Visual Art

Now, let’s look at the art world- visual art. My daughter, Alexa, is a big artist too! Better than I ever was, because I didn’t go deep into it. What she did was to film herself, using her phone, doing various pieces of art. At one point, she did a mural on my younger daughter, Nirisi’s (Nirisi Baby Genius) room. She did some monkeys and a rainbow on Nirisi’s bedroom door. She filmed the process and put it up on her YouTube channel and Instagram page. She doesn’t have a whole lot of followers or subscribers yet. She has maybe 1000 followers on Instagram and 100-200 subscribers on YouTube, but the thing is, you never know who is going to see it. After she put that up, she was contacted by an agency who commissioned her to do a much larger mural at a local hospital, and she was paid for that! So, that’s a way to get your work out there. So, you can do COMMISSIONS. People hire you to create pieces of art for them. In today’s world, there’s so many opportunities in visual art.

When I was growing up, you may have heard what I’ve heard. “Who will pay you to be an artist?” There are so many ways that you can monetize that in today’s world, especially now, in the realm of digital art. I purchased an art piece from Romaine Lewis (@mr_rlewis on Instagram). It’s a piece of digital art, and when you look at it, you might think it’s a painting or a pencil drawing, but he did it entirely on the computer. How he puts his work out and creates a demand, is by including a story, a meaning and a message attached to it. He uses the carousel feature on Instagram, and he will show the art, and then on the next slide, he will have the meaning and explanation for the piece and that helps people to connect to that particular piece. 

Now, because he does specifically digital art, he can duplicate this and sell it multiple times, which is really cool in terms of creating revenue. He can create multiple streams of income from the effort of creating one single piece. Of course, the more unique it is, the more he can charge for it. The piece I have was limited to four copies, so that makes it more unique and fewer people have it, so he can charge more for it. If he was to publish only one copy, then that would cost more than what the four copies would cost. That’s the benefit of doing original art as well. Even if it’s not digital, and you do traditional painting or drawing, you can still make copies of the art. I talked about the cover of my book Unfettered being a self-portrait. So, I can have the original, but I converted it to digital to use for my book cover.

That’s another way that you can make money from your original art. You can license out images of your art to other people. Romaine, for example, collaborated with another artist, who is a candle maker. And he has images of his art on that person’s candles! That makes the candles more attractive for sale, because they not only smell nice, they also look pretty, which increases the value of that particular product. LICENSING is a great way to make use of your artwork and monetize. We haven’t even ventured into the world of NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, which are really changing the game for digital art. I did an entire episode of Taking Stock on non-fungible tokens so you can check that out where we explain what NFTs are, how they work and how you can use it to make money for your creative business.

So, the bottom line is, in order to fully maximize your monetary potential from your art, you want to: 

1. Repurpose your content into as many formats as you can. You can digitize it or use it in different formats like print, putting it on a t-shirt or a coffee cup, or anything that you want to sell. If it’s a book, or written word, you can convert that to an audio format, and possibly even a video format, where it’s yourself reading it out loud and finding different ways to repurpose and monetize the very same content. 
2. Build a catalogue so that people can find your work easily and see what they would be interested in. So, Alexa for example, did her @alexararts Instagram page so people could go easily to that and find a catalogue of her work and see how talented she is and commission her to do something or buy one of her existing products. This is the same with Romaine. 
3. Publish online! So, we’ve been talking about using social media already. You want to make sure that people can easily find you. You can have a website, but it’s not 100% necessary. You can utilize social media to build your platform to get an audience who follows you and loves your art. This can be really critical to your success in the art world for not only being known for your talent, but also being paid for your talent.