Welcome to Inspiration Fridays! In this series, I meditate on a quote from the current featured book. Today I’m talking about this quote from Jane Friedman’s The Business of Being a Writer:
“To make your writing the foundation of a sustainable living will likely involve compromise. If you want to realize monetary gain you have to be willing to treat (some of) your art as a business. No writer is entitled to earn a living from his writing, or even to be paid for his writing; once you seek payment, you have to consider the market for what you're producing, especially during a time when supply outpaces demand. This is one of the most difficult tasks writers face: to adopt a market-driven eye when necessary—to see their work as something to be positioned and sold. . . Writers who see this as a creative challenge rather than a burden are more likely to survive the cycle of pitching and rejection without sinking into hopelessness.”
There’s always been tension between the artist’s need to create beauty and the artist’s need to eat. And we often romanticize and honor the idea of art being produced free from the constraints of commercialism. This makes sense on the surface: many of us come to our art because we love it and enjoy making it. The last thing many of us want to think about when we’re in the throes of creative passion is how we can sell what we’ve made. Such thoughts can get in the way of our creativity. Some people even believe that commercial concerns taint what we create, make it less special or important.
But that’s only one side of the issue. The world is full of great art produced from commercial demands. Take Italian renaissance art as an example. The masterpieces of Raphael, Michelangelo, and da Vinci? They were all commissioned works. If patrons had not paid for their time and materials and provided specific guidelines of what they wanted, we would not have the David, the Raphael Rooms in the Vatican, or The Last Supper. If you want a more writing-specific example, look no further than Shakespeare. How far would he have gotten without the Crown’s patronage?
The world is full of great art produced from commercial demands.
While it’s true that many creatives produce great art without concern for fame or financial success, Friedman points out in several places throughout the book that this is often only made possible by privileged status or preexisting wealth.
All that said, I think the best thing to do after educating yourself about the many ways to build a successful writing career is to find your own balance between art and commerce. If you want to make any sort of profit as a writer, you’re going to have to learn how the market works, what kind of content people are willing to pay for, and how to reach your audience. If you want to make a full-time living from your writing, you’re likely going to have to get creative with pulling together multiple sources of revenue from multiple types of writing gigs—even ones that aren’t your favorite—to supplement the money made from your passion projects. Make peace with the fact that you’re going to have to learn to market yourself and use your writing skills in multiple ways. And, like Friedman says, choose to see this as a “creative challenge” rather than a chore.
Make peace with the fact that you’re going to have to learn to market yourself.
Friedman dedicates a whole section of The Business of Being a Writer to building an author platform and figuring out what types of marketing might work for you. If this is a topic you need to learn more about (and let’s be honest, that’s most of us!) I highly recommend reading it!
Watch for more meditations on Jane Friedman’s The Business of Being a Writer, and happy writing!