The Artist's Way (of Making Money)

Need to pay your bills AND make your art? This one’s for you.

Sorry the image is oversized. Substack’s photo editor simply does not wish to permit me to size it otherwise. Oh well!

I find myself in the season of simultaneously managing my own financial affairs while also helping a few loved ones through employment searches. Most of them are also artists, and one element that causes stress for folks like us is the way in which information about work and finance can seem so hidden, like a weird shameful secret.

One can imagine a persistent whisper on the breeze of doom: You’re not making all your money off your art? YUCK! It’s super-easy for the rest of us to do all of the things all of the time. What’s wrong with you?

Perhaps merely by sharing some of my own information, I might help you or an artist friend of yours feel a little less alone. I don’t imagine any reader of this newsletter thinks its author is a glamorous individual filing her nails as she sits atop piles of ART COINS (also, this sounds uncomfortable) but perhaps a few more details will still be illuminating.

I’m not a financial coach, and am in recovery from chronic debting. My aim isn’t to give you strategies, although you may take some away if it makes sense to you. My aim is to provide a window into one stranger’s experience.

Again, I really hope to help somebody (or many somebodies) feel less alone.

As a kid, I wanted to make my living writing books. I thought publishing one book meant that you were successful forever, and that authors only took other jobs because it was lonely writing books all day.

Now on to my present-day financial reality!

Based on rough calculations, about 85% of my income last year came from a full-time job in digital marketing at a nonprofit. About 15% came from my career as an artist: residuals from TV acting gigs; my more experimental and free-form writing, photography and podcast over at Patreon; editing and coaching for individual writers; paid live comedy or storytelling gigs; and - yes indeed - this very newsletter, SARATONIN.

I have always been fortunate to be able to work multiple jobs, many of them pretty interesting to me. But for most of my adult life, there was nothing steady. Aside from a couple of years hosting and producing radio, I mainly coasted on a combination of freelance comedy and writing gigs, book deals, script deals, family handouts, borrowing from friends, massive credit card debt, and loans to pay off said massive credit card debt.

Sometimes it looked really cool from the outside (at least, that’s what I told myself.) I did a lot of stand-up comedy, even though I didn’t love stand-up comedy. I loved positive attention for my work, but at base I still wanted to be an author. Yet even as I was happy to publish a few books in rapid succession, I learned from the inside that this does not necessarily lead to a life of financial ease.

I felt like I was running faster and faster on some kind of hamster wheel built for a human who really, really wanted to keep up appearances.

All of that began to change when I turned 36 and realized I needed some order and control to this chaos.

It helped that I had already published my fourth book, Real Artists Have Day Jobs, which happened to be about the very subject. As is common among authors, I wrote the book I needed to read.

Before recognizing and beginning to deal with the various other issues in my life, including active addictions, I got a full-time job. I feel now that, for me, it was lifesaving and pointed me in the direction of recovery. I have never stopped being grateful that I was able to get it.