While learning and practicing your art don’t have to cost much, particularly with so much training information available on the internet—in this blog post I won’t discuss the very real digital divide—you must have money in order to get your work before those who can throw their connections and financial support behind you. Take this example of the 1000 initial contact brochures an artist sent out to art consultants, private dealers, and galleries in a twelve month period. As a result, her income quadrupled.
“The cost of the brochure, including printing, layout, and design for one thousand copies and envelopes, was $2,392. The artist spent another $533 for the design and printing of a letterhead for cover letters, making the total cost of the project $2,925. The brochures were sent via first-class mail, which, at the time of the mailing, came to a postage rage of fifty-two cents each. Thus, the final cost of each package was $3.44 [for a total of $3440].”
– How to Survive and Prosper As An Artist, by Caroll Michels
$3.44 per package doesn’t seem like a lot of money to some of us. We like to say things like, “It is less than buying a latte from Starbucks!” What we don’t often stop to consider is there are many people who don’t buy lattes at Starbucks, because if they did they wouldn’t have the $2.75 necessary to take the bus to work that day.
The other thing we don’t consider is the artist is not paying $3.44 at a time to send a package out. The artist has to have access to $2392 up front to get the brochures designed, laid out, and printed. Then the artist has to have access to another $533 up front to have their letterhead designed and printed. If they are sending out 100 brochures at a time, the artist must have access to $52 up front each time they go to the post office to mail a batch of brochures…and they have to do that ten times.
Let’s not gloss over the reality of the money it took to get to the point where the artist’s income quadrupled as a result of self-promotion. Without access to a total of $3440 they wouldn’t have seen those results so quickly. That is why I added the total to the end of the quote; it puts their investment into perspective.
Let me explain this again on a personal level. I am in the process of preparing initial contact packages to introduce art industry insiders to my work. I hired the wonderfully talented Jean Goode to do the design. Once I have paid off my credit card from that and from buying my new camera body I will be able to put the money together to have my postcards printed. 100 of them will cost about $70. I still have to buy the mailing lists, which will cost around $400. Without taking into account letterhead and postage—having someone design a logo for my letterhead would cost at least another few hundred dollars, not counting the cost of printing—that is $470 I need to have access to before I can even think about getting my first set of packages out the door. It will cost less for future packages since I will already have the postcard design, logo design, and mailing lists, but the initial outlay is significant for someone who has only $80 left over at the end of the month after taking care of all of her financial responsibilities and putting money aside for emergencies.
Think about the many talented people out there whose work may never be seen, not because they “didn’t try/work hard enough or didn’t have what it takes”, but because they simply do not have the money to forge the connections necessary to get their work in front of a paying audience.
Even with the saving I must do to put these packages together I recognize my class privilege. It takes time for me to get the money together, but it isn’t entirely out of my reach. I am so very grateful and humbled by that fact. I have compassion for those for whom this sort of thing is out of their reach. I don’t “feel sorry” for them. I feel determined to do what I can to help myself so that at some point I can help someone else, particularly artistic women of color who have aged out of the art and mentoring resources available to teens and twenty-somethings in underserved populations.
If you are someone who is hustling to get your work before a larger audience and haven’t yet seen the results you want, please don’t put yourself down by thinking you would already have that larger audience if you had only tried hard enough. Hard work is important, but there is far more to the equation. Introduction packages, audition CDs/tapes, promotional videos, and all of those little things we artists use to promote ourselves cost money to produce, money which may not be easy for everyone to access. I don’t yet have a solution to that problem, but I do know remaining positive while continuing to work hard will help you keep going until you can find a solution that works for you.
