How Much Money Do Self-Employed Artists Make?

Everyone wants to know what a full-time artist’s income looks like, but very few people actually break down the numbers.

We want to give you a little #BehindTheScenes look at what artists can make AND how they do it.

We’ve found that an art business with multiple income streams tends to be the best business model for artists.

Multiple sources of revenue mean having different parts of your creative business working at one time. You can learn more about income streams for artists here.

Once you figure out which income streams you’d like to pursue in your own art business, it’s important to have a financial goal in mind that you’d like to hit in order to feel confident in your income growth this year.

Here’s a breakdown of where our income came from last year!

Let’s say our income goal is 100k

Since math can be hard, we’re going to use 100k as an example goal since it’s a nice number that’s easy to divide.

Knowing that our goal is 100k, let’s look at some income streams that we can use to reach that number:

• Online Shop

• Online Education

• Freelance Work

• Art Licensing

• Book Royalties

Now we know where our income will be coming from…here’s an example of how we set goals for individual revenue streams in our businesses.

Let’s pretend we’re planning out how much of our income we want to realistically come from our online shop. We can start with an estimated percentage of income we think could originate from the shop.

Let’s say 15% of our 100K goal from our shop seems reasonable. 15% of $100,000 is $15,000.

If we know (or guess) that our average sale will be $30, we can divide $15,000 by $30 to see roughly how many sales we will need.

$15,000 divided by $30 = 500 sales per year, or 42 sales per month, or 1-2 sales per day.

Now you have more than just an income goal…you have a sales goal!

You can treat each income stream this same way and work backwards from your revenue goals to make concrete daily, weekly, and monthly plans for your business.

Ready to break down the rest?

Watch our YouTube video, “How Much Money Do Self-Employed Artists Make?”, to break down all of the other income streams and figure out how you can make 100k this year.

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