I was going to write some more ponderings about working while travelling, as I’m still trying to work out a variety of travel plans for the year and need to consider whether or not I will be working a bit, working full-time or not working at all during them. And I have to think about them individually, as well as as a whole, because I have take into account work that is booked in and fulfilling those commitments, but also the fact that, if I don’t work, or I work at a lower capacity while travelling the travel costs me even more.
And then that got me thinking about my whole money mindsight and why do find it so hard to consider regular travel (and maybe if I call them holidays instead of travel that will help) as a right and part of what I factor in and something to factor in as actual full 100% time off from working.
Which then led to thinking about how hard I find it to genuinely and absolutely take time off and relax. And I think a lot of comes down to money mindsight, or how I think about money and earning money.
As you know, I want this year to be about really digging down into building a stable and reasonably large perennial income from my illustration and pattern design work (and possibly also from writing, including this Substack, though that would be more of a bonus, rather than the plan at this point).
What I’m currently working on is a colouring book that I will publish via Amazon’s KDP platform and also make available as a downloadable printable one in my Etsy shop (where I have a number of printable colouring books already that have made me a few hundred pounds). I am almost up to ten pages and then intend to pull out some of the patterns to create some full-page pattern pages, so I think, I can get up to maybe 14 from the content I have already drawn. I am aiming for 30 colouring/drawing (some of the pages aren’t pure colouring, but drawing prompts as well) pages, to make a 70-page printed book (because the left-hand pages need to blank due to bleeding through the pages).
I’m really enjoying creating it and thinking about how people might use it, rather than just dumping a bunch of existing drawings in there. And I’m getting some mindful creativity satisfaction out of the drawing, which is something I absolutely need in my life. But… but… it’s taking a long time, perhaps because I’m enjoying it, and I could absolutely have just dumped a bunch of existing drawings in and quickly ran out a KDP colouring book (and, frankly, seeing the quality of a lot of the KDP colouring books out there, that would still have been way better than probably 80% of them).
And that’s where I find myself falling down in other areas of trying to create one of these mythical (I know they’re not actually mythical, because I know people who absolutely do have that kind of income, but currently it feels mythical to me, because I am continually not managing to create it) perennial incomes. I have LOADS of decent art (the older stuff is decent, not good, I would say, but I’m sure I’m not alone in really not liking my older work very much, while plenty of ordinary (non-illustrators/designers) still think it’s wonderful, somehow) sitting on my computer (or in the cloud – actually most of it was in Creative Cloud so now it’s just on my computer and not in any cloud and I should really fix that – and who else is really annoyed that Adobe just ripped away Creative Cloud storage?) doing mostly nothing. And a fair bit of good work, too. Just sitting there. Some of it’s in my portfolio, but quite a lot isn’t, because the portfolio is curated (and that’s something else I’m doing is curating a slightly different collection to go in there and to split into a small number of categories) and definitely doesn’t contain every illustration I’ve drawn and every pattern, or pattern motif, I’ve created.
If I spent a few hours a week going through the existing work and maybe updating colours here and there and tweaking a pattern layout here and there (or actually even not doing that and trying to pretend that I like the older work as it stands, or just being able to ignore the fact that I don’t), I could put loads of content on stock sites and POD sites. Loads! I wouldn’t need to spend time creating new content maybe even for a whole year. I could just dedicate a small amount of time to repurposing the old stuff and getting it out there somewhere making something, even if it’s only those teenys tiny little micro payments you get from stock sites.
But if I did that? I wouldn’t be being creative. I would be being a designer. Sorry – that’s unfair, because designers are incredibly creative; maybe I would be being an artworker. I would not being feeding my very deep underlying need to create new work.
But… (I know, this article is jam-packed full of buts!) I would be perfectly happy to be doing that if someone were paying me a fee per upload, or similar. In my educational publishing work, I love creating trackers and working out how many PowerPoints I need to create per week/per working day/per hour or how many spider diagrams I need to create to get through that batch, and I also frequently put in a formula that will show me how much money I have made that day/that week/that month on those PowerPoints, or spider diagrams, or whatever. (It’s harder to do with project or editorial management, because that’s usually and hourly or day rate full stop. There’s not quite the same satisfaction, because you can’t have a really efficient hour and have made twice you normally would have, because it’ just an hour.)
No-one is paying me to process and upload old work. There is potential in every single piece that does go up there, that could generate some money at some point, that it could somehow become a particularly popular item and make more than I would make from a week of creating spider diagrams or PowerPoints). But there’s no guarantee.
And so I put it off in favour of the things that have an absolute and tangible fee attached to them – whether that’s £7 per spider diagram, £50 per PowerPoint, £30 per hour or £300 per day (just pulling figures out of thin air, there). Because those tangible fees are guaranteed to be in my bank account before the end of the next month and therefore guaranteed to be there to pay the mortgage, the ridiculously high energy bill, the council tax, the broadband, the mobile phone bills, the water bill, the Ocado bill, the many many Co-op purchases (how we seem to go there at least twice a day when we also get a weekly Ocado shop I do not know!).
So, I continue with creating new work that takes me longer, and only intermittently uploading new work, when I have also taken the time to do the artworking part of it. Because that’s what feeds my soul. And I leave the other stuff to feed my belly (and the bill monster).
I need to find a way to rework my money mindset, or perhaps to trick my brain, so that I can set aside time to do the artworking jobs, both for old content and new, and to feel the same satisfaction when I fill in those trackers as I do when I fill in the ones that are attached to tangible fees.
Any tips?
OR.. (and this is what I settle on maybe every other year) I accept that this is just not how I work and who I am and just push more for illustration work that can feed the same kind of fee-tracking obsession. Where there is a flat fee (or advance) to be spread over a specific amount of time and/or a specific number of illustrations or pages. And give up on the perennial income idea entirely.
OR… (and this one I don’t think I want, really, but is definitely something that comes up as an idea intermittently) forget trying to make a consistent living from my creativity and just create for the sake of creativity and to feed my soul and provide mindful calm. Because will it really still feed my soul if it becomes the only way I feed my belly and the bill monster?