#4: The Importance of Commercial Goals

How to get over the fear of succeeding

An hour-ish arm and hand study done in PS from Bodies In Motion.

I've had this fear of saying that I want to make money from art. A fear of telling people that what I make is valuable and worth spending their time and money on.

It's many things rolled up into one - imposter syndrome, cultural values, artistic beliefs etc. - a lot of things manifesting into this idea that I should just shut up and do my work with no expectation of any reward at the end of it.

I do believe in making art for intrinsic over extrinsic reasons. I really believe that you have to learn to enjoy the journey. I believe that over the entirety of your artistic life, you should spend more time working on your craft and making things and less time talking about it. I still think that's the way to make good art.

There is a negative side to this, though. If you only focus on the journey with no planning towards any of the rewards, a very real and practical truth that eventually everyone will run into is:

Any art form, no matter how cheap or free it is, requires some level of monetary input to sustain itself.

Making art ranks quite cheap among other 'things to do'. Most of the time we can get by with a small space, some basic materials, instruments and maybe a computer that's a few years old.

But at the base level most people still need to pay rent / their mortgage, buy food, pay bills; all the things that any human being requires to live in 2023. I also believe art needs input for any output to be created - books, movies, travel, and so on.

Basically, as much as I'd like to, I can't live in a bubble where all I do is make exactly the art that I want and expect my life to sustain itself. The economy isn't set up in that way - and while I have my fingers crossed that universal basic income will occur in my lifetime, as it stands, human beings need to work to live.

There's also an argument to be made that art is created to be shared - a piece of art only exists once it has garnered a reaction from someone other than its creator.

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Setting Commercial Goals

From when I was 13 and decided to pursue art seriously, I've set what I call 'personal' goals for myself. They were always to do with improving, practising more, making more art, consuming more art. The goals were never 'build an audience' - 'sell your art' - 'market yourself.' It felt like chasing fame and clout and I avoided it like the plague.

But lately, realizing the pure essential nature of money in the role of creating art has made me a lot less shy and afraid of making money and growing an audience by doing things I enjoy.

I've started labelling all of my goals either 'personal' or 'commercial'. Just defining this split between goals has helped a lot; it lets me clearly recognize my efforts towards one or the other, and neither one are good or evil.

There's a middle ground in which both commercial and personal goals can live together. Whether they're both equally as important as the other is open to debate, but the fact of the matter is that both of them need each other to exist.

Commercial goals need to have good art generated by personal goals to market and sell, and personal goals need to have money and time generated by achieving the commercial goals to create art - it's cyclical!

I'm choosing to define my commercial goals as any goal where the outcome involves an external factor that is beyond my control.

Commercial goals could include:

- reaching your 1000 true fans

- making your first sale from your art

- winning an art competition

- hitting x amount of followers on your newsletter, blog, Instagram etc.

- increasing your creative community

- making enough in a month from your artistic pursuits to pay rent

- launching a passive-income revenue stream

A complicated and nuanced question for any artist to ask themselves is - to what degree should your artistic output be determined by your commercial goals? For example, should you change the style of art you create to land an industry job? I'll write more about that next time.

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Ingest:

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin - I've never read a book like this in my life. It's a crazy, beautiful, clever, nuanced book touching creativity, gaming, love, race, and disability, among other things. It'll be one I revisit many times over.

Jujutsu Kaisen: Chapter 223 - One of the coolest chapter of any manga I've read, ever. It's the starting culmination of a long story, and the art is dynamic and beautiful - so many gorgeous hand poses to study!