How To Turn Your Art Into A Business

(Transitioning from someone who creates art to someone who sells his or her art for profit can be difficult. As David Deeds, Schulze Professor of Entrepreneurship at University of St. Thomas, wrote in “To Turn Your Art Into a Business, Learn to Manage Your Time,” you may want to find a partner to help run the business. But in his new book, “The Paid Artist: How to Make Your Art Into a Business,” artist and self-proclaimed business geek John Endris offers five steps to get started on your own. Here is an excerpt from the book about them.)

It may be painful to reflect on the financial aspects of your undefinable contribution, but by doing so you will take the guesswork out of your livelihood. This way, you can determine how much you need to earn or save to cover your expenses and create your goals and milestones around.

A few questions you’ll want to answer to help you begin making your art into a business: What do comparable artists charge? What is the minimum you can pay yourself? What have you sold your art for in the past? How much does it cost to produce one piece of art?

Now, here are five steps to really begin your process of launching your art business:

Step 1: Profit and Loss (or P&L). This sounds difficult but is quite rudimentary. First, list out all of the art you have sold. Then total it and label it “total revenue.” Next, list all of your expenses to create it. (Fixed Costs are expenses that must be paid no matter what and do not fluctuate with demand. Variable Costs increase or decrease with demand.) Then total that and label it “total expense.” Next, deduct the total expenses from the total revenue. This is called your Net Income/Profit.

If you have more expenses than income (negative Net Income), you are a normal artist.

If you have more expenses than income (negative Net Income), you are a normal artist. Becoming established is challenging and requires intrinsic fortitude and motivation that impatient businesspeople do not have and can’t buy. Seeing the loss makes it real, which is good.

Pretending to be successful when you have massive losses will never help you turn things around. If you intend on doing projections or a budget, add a contingency for wasted materials and mistakes.

Step 2: Funding. You could list all the things you need, and then determine how you will pay for those things. You may not need to fund your business and be totally fine with everything you have got so far.

If not, this section can still help you explore your goals.

Getting a loan will be a challenge because you will be soliciting funding on speculative earnings. Will you use your savings? Or a grant? Are you seeking a grant or do you want to find one? How much do you need? Where will you get that funding from?

Here are some popular sites for artist grants:

• CaFE (CallForEntry.org)
• Artist Grant
• NY Foundation for the Arts
• Cranbrook
• Americans for the Arts
• Harpo Foundation
• Puffin Foundation
• ArtDeadline.com
• National Endowment For the Arts

Read more: https://www.forbes.com/