(Nimue) My friend and collaborator Jessica Law has recently launched a Patreon account in the hopes that people will support her as a creator. In this post, she talks about how difficult it is making things wok as a musician. I play viola for her. Go…
My friend and collaborator Jessica Law has recently launched a Patreon account in the hopes that people will support her as a creator. In this post, she talks about how difficult it is making things wok as a musician. I play viola for her. Going out as a four piece band, it isn't easy to get gigs that cover the cost of being there, the travelling time, performance time and rehearsal time at a minimum wage level. This is normal across the creative industries.
I've always worked other jobs, although I don't talk about them much. Many of them haven't been that exciting. It's easier to get paying work marketing or editing books than it is to get paid for writing them. I've done a lot of social media and blog related work in previous years, and a whole host of other things as well. There are only so many hours in a day, only so much energy a person can deploy, so writing part time is difficult.
You are more likely to succeed as a professional creator if you can invest time in it. In practice that most often means having someone who can support you while you get going, and who can continue to support you once you are working. You can be a full time professional author with a decent contract at a larger publishing house and still not earn enough to live on. Wild success as an author looks an awful lot like poverty, as things stand as at the moment. Which is bonkers.
Creating professionally means practice, research and development before you do the creative bit of the work. Once you have something you can put into the world you need to sell it, market yourself, build an audience. Like all other jobs, there's admin to do, and networking and building a customer base. It's exactly like being a small business, but one where creating the product takes a huge amount of time, effort and skill. It's exceedingly difficult making all of that work when you are also working other jobs.
Patreon is really helpful. I don't have a massive revenue, but it's reasonably predictable, and reassuring. Royalties get paid every six months for most authors, so having anything in the gaps is also a blessing.
Jessica Law is an amazing, brilliant person. She was part of The Mechanisms – a band with an international following. She was part of The Magnus Archives – another very successful project in terms of popularity and size of audience. She's got a novel out there, and her first children's book was a huge success and her second one came out this year. She's the sort of person who really should be winning, and should be able to create as a full time professional. But, the world doesn't work that way at the moment.
One off donations are also a thing, and you can find me on ko-fi, where you can also pick up a lot of pdfs of my work, and drop a quid or two if the fancy takes you. It all helps. https://ko-fi.com/O4O3AI4T
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