Semi-Starving Artist
I need help earning more money. I’m a workhorse, great at ideas, and a very creative artist. Self-employed artist for 11 years. I’m busy rebuilding my financial life post-divorce.
What I need is more income to support my good ideas. I’d like to be able to hire an assistant so I can do the idea making, while someone else makes the machine work. I’ve got a new business I’m busy launching as well.
I would like you to mentor me, or coach me toward this. I can offer you ART in trade. I’m rich in art, great at color.
Forget the assistant. When you are a small business you can’t afford to hire an assistant to do the work while you do the ideas. Ideas are worth nothing if you can’t get them done. Everyone has a lot of ideas, most never get implemented. Seth Godin has a lot about this in his book, Linchpin.
And forget the full-time artist thing as a way to be financially solvent. For one thing, it’s nearly impossible to make good art when you are constantly worried about money. The stereotype of a productive, starving artist is just myth. I cover that, and other stuff, in this post
http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/02/06/how-to-build-a-career-as-an-artist/
So you probably need to get a dayjob right away. It’s very hard to figure out exactly how to make money from a business — how to market, etc. But you need to get to the reality that your business is not about art, it’s about marketing. How to get people to go there, and how to provide people with stuff they actually want to buy. That’s very very hard and you’ll need a lot of time to figure it out — a lot of time trying something and thinking and trying something and thinking. It wont’ be a full time job til you have a lot of traffic. So get a job now.
Penelope