Patreon

Making a living wage as an Artist and Writer is actually pretty hard and yes I am also a Science Communicator but that is kind of just the same thing. Ways I make money vary – I wish I could do it all for free, for the love and stuff but I can’t because you know I need to eat and so do my kids.

I am lucky… I am married and bar a short stint of 3 months where I was the sole earner and completely failed to actually manage to pay for everything… my husbands wages pay for mortgage and car but it doesn’t pay for everything.

And even if I put no money into the house I still need to buy things like a new computer and cameras and art supplies and those can add up surprisingly fast. Yes writing is a cheap hobby… but it does still cost.

Besides which this is no hobby this is my living.

So I run workshops, I used to do a lot of bespoke copy writing for blogs, it ate up all my time. My writing time was often swallowed by me trying to type up menus into webforms for various marketing sites and so on. I sell prints, I used to have adverts on the blogs and make ok money from them but that stopped when the blog bubble burst. I teach people stuff, judge competitions, make and sell zines and story jars and jewellery.

I do lots of scrapping the pennies together stuff… I have merchandise. On of the things I am trying out is Patreon. This is like a rolling Kickstarter or crowd funding campaign. I have used such platfroms before for specific one off projects but this one I hope to be longer lasting. It has worked well for other endeavours and artists.

There are different levels of funding people can opt for – I set it up as a monthly subscription because I tend to put the various blog posts out there for free for everyone and some people like to give money for that. Above the £3 a month range there are a variety of awards and I post previews of work on their first.

I have already used money from the patreon to remove adds from some of the sites/blogs and to buy a new camera though sadly still no new computer!

The launch of Love: A Stranger Dream would have been a lot harder without it and it has sprouted an art project all of it’s own!

So if you feel you would like to support this artist then this might be a good place to start 🙂

Posted: Thursday, February 16th, 2017 @ 9:03 am
Categories: Merchandise.
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