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    Cash Flow for Creators: How to Transform Your Art Into A Career
    Cash Flow for Creators: How to Transform Your Art Into A Career
    Cash Flow for Creators: How to Transform Your Art Into A Career
    Ebook193 pages2 hours

    Cash Flow for Creators: How to Transform Your Art Into A Career

    By Michael W. Lucas

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    About this ebook

    People want to give you money for your art? Congratulations!

     

    Now what???

     

    Business is all about cash flow, and cash flow is just a game. A game with simple rules. A game you can win, with the ultimate prize: a life doing what you love.

    Ask that helpful cousin with the business degree for advice and they'll gleefully prattle on about LLCs and deductions and accountants and the tax tactics of C versus S corporations. It's entirely accurate and completely unhelpful. Books about businesses like pet shops and burger franchises? Even less useful.

     

    You need advice from a creator who pays the mortgage with his craft.

     

    Cash Flow For Creators provides a map and a flashlight for building an artistic business from the ground up. Do you need a business bank account, and why? Should you incorporate, or make an LLC? How do you cope with accountants, regulations and deductions? Can you get your family on board? How do you pay taxes? What about keeping a business going, not just year after year but decade after decade? In the bewildering torrent of business rules, which matter to a creator—and which don't? Cash Flow for Creators has you covered, and tells you the secret no other business book will:

     

    Business is easier than art.

     

    Once someone explains the rules, and tells you how to win.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTilted Windmill Press
    Release dateMay 4, 2020
    ISBN9781393466253
    Cash Flow for Creators: How to Transform Your Art Into A Career
    Author

    Michael W. Lucas

    Michael W Lucas lives in Detroit, Michigan. He is the author of several critically-acclaimed nonfiction books and assorted short stories. His interests include martial arts and Michigan history.

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      Book preview

      Cash Flow for Creators - Michael W. Lucas

      Copyright Information

      Cash Flow for Creators

      Copyright 2020 by Michael W Lucas (https://mwl.io).

      All rights reserved.

      Author: Michael W Lucas

      Copyediting: Amanda Robinson

      Cover design: Beth Shanks-Flumigan

      ISBN (paperback): 978-1-64235-041-8

      ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-64235-042-5

      All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system currently existing or yet to be invented, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder and the publisher. For information on book distribution, translations, or other rights, please contact Tilted Windmill Press (accounts@tiltedwindmillpress.com).

      The information in this book is provided on an As Is basis, without warranty. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this work, neither the author nor Tilted Windmill Press shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in it.

      Tilted Windmill Press

      https://www.tiltedwindmillpress.com

      Acknowledgements

      I wrote this book by popular demand, and in self-defense. People kept asking me questions. I want to be helpful, especially to fellow creators. Eventually it was easier to write this book than to explain the topic one more time.

      I’m grateful to those folks who read this book before publication and offered useful suggestions for improvement: Misty Bromley, Jamie Ferguson, Barb Giorgi, Bonnie Koenig, Linda Jordan-Eichner, Stefon Mears, Rachel Robinson, Johanna Rothman, Rebecca M. Senese, Mia Tokatlian, Stephannie Tallent, Tami Veldura, and Christina York.

      I also vastly appreciate the encouragement and support from everyone in Chicken Club, an author’s business and psychiatric support group with a treatable but uncurable fried chicken problem: ZZ Clayborne, Rob Cornell, Brigid Collins, and Alex Kourvo. Despite my last name beginning with something other than that elite bleeding-edge hard C sound, they tolerate my presence.

      I have an extra bucket of gratitude for Alex, who for several years has reviewed writing how-to books on her Writing Slices blog. She turned her encyclopedic knowledge of the how-to genre and her incisive red pen on an early draft of this manuscript, and helped make this book the best it could be.

      Oh, and: Ma Lou’s Chicken in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Get some. Just don’t get between the writers and their platters.

      As always, this is for Liz.

      Chapter 1: Creators and Business

      You’re a creator. You love making a thing. You made the thing, and made more of the thing, and got better at making the thing, until something truly bizarre started happening. The thing became The Thing, and people gave you money for it.

      Sometimes a lot of money.

      And that…is when everything went horribly wrong.

      Some of us dream of a day when we can make a living practicing our craft. We look at those who pay the rent by writing books or painting landscapes or hand-carving fountain pens that would make primordial penmaster Walter Sheaffer jealous, and we hunger for that life. Making a living as a creator means being among the best at what you do, so you plunge into study and practice with near monomaniacal focus.

      Learn business? Why would you do that, when you could spend that time learning your art? Besides, you’ve met business people. They’re boring compared to artistic sorts! And some of the most successful have dollar-store canned chowder for brains. How hard could it be?

      Then money appears. And you discover that business is an entirely separate craft. Business is a tabletop role-playing game run by a lackadaisical Dungeon Master who occasionally downs too much caffeine and goes for Total Party Kill. Accepting money for your art shackles you to that game.

      Some people realize this, get scared, and stop accepting money. Others don’t worry about it until the government tax agents knock on the door and ask if they’ll come quietly or would prefer to be dragged. A tragic few of the most skilled artists become so traumatized by business that they flat-out stop practicing their craft.

      Some of us deal with the business head-on, and turn the art that brings us joy into our full-time job.

      People congratulated me when I started paying the mortgage by writing books. Many folks asked if this was a real thing (yes, it is) and if writers could make money doing it (yes, you can). The question I got most often from my fellow creative sorts, though, surprised me.

      How do you do make a living as an artist?

      Yes, beginners asked. But so did people who were making money at their craft. People who had signed six-figure book contracts or routinely sold paintings for thousands of dollars. They had the skill. They had the market. They had absolutely no idea how to manage what they’d discovered, or how to take that next step.

      Making a living with your craft is a long game.¹ Start playing early.

      Who Am I?

      Who is this slick jerk offering to expose the dark secrets of business as a creative for the price of a cheap book? I’m a person with a long and storied history of failure, that’s who.

      Most businesses fail. The exact numbers vary depending on who you get your statistics from and what they’re trying to sell you. Different groups claim that anywhere from twenty to ninety percent of new businesses fail in their first year. Even the optimistic folks that declare eighty percent of all businesses survive their first year admit that seventy percent fail by year ten.

      I am no exception. I worked for a bunch of dot-com companies, got tangentially involved with the business side out of self-defense, and watched them fail. I live in Detroit, world capital of Failed Industry Titans and home to thousands of triumphant small businesses. Watching businesses fail is like reading a magazine’s slush pile or judging a student art fair. You learn huge amounts about what not to do.

      Further, I’ve run my own failed companies. I failed in publishing in the nineties and consulting in the naughties. Each failure taught me about my strengths and weaknesses. I am a good enough writer that I don’t need to do anything but write books. I am a cruel joke of a salesperson. I am imagination-oriented. I am terrible at phone calls. In other words, I’m a tediously stereotypical creative. Any business I run must be oriented to my strengths and must avoid my weaknesses.

      I’ve filed tax returns, dealt with accountants. But most importantly, I’ve found ways to think about business and money that suit my artistic temperament. My writing business has lasted since the last millennium, and has paid my bills for several years.

      Today, I make my living writing books. By make a living, I mean I pay the mortgage and an assortment of utilities for my family. By writing books, I mean I choose topics that I find interesting and that I think might interest other people, write them, and offer them to the general public.

      I don’t write for private organizations. I don’t consult. I don’t podcast, even though my big bald head totally gives me the look of a cheerful supervillain and the thought of Lex Lucas Against The World intrigues me. I don’t even charge a speaking fee. Should my dulcet rants suddenly be in demand at conferences I might start charging, but only to reduce how frequently I have to find pants and leave the house. I do have affiliate links on my web site; if you follow the links on my site to buy one of my books on Amazon or Kobo or Apple, I get a couple pennies extra. That last covers my gelato bill.²

      I make a living. Writing books. The books I want to write. No excuses, evasions, or elisions.

      Could I make more by adding a few hours of consulting, or contracting with a company to produce their documentation, or signing on with a speakers’ bureau? Sure!

      But I don’t want to.

      I make enough to live the life I want, save for retirement, and have someone else mow the dang lawn.

      Maybe you don’t want to go that far. Perhaps you only want to cover expenses, or give yourself a cushion in case of emergency. That’s absolutely, 100% valid. But taking money for what you create means you must learn business. More importantly, you must understand business. And that’s what I’m bringing you. Other books will teach you about double-entry accounting and QuickBooks and ratio of sales to advertising expenditure taxation differentials in multinational whoosamajig please-send-help. I can help you understand what a creative business is, and what it isn’t.

      I am not an accountant. I am not a lawyer. You should not take anything I say as legal or taxation advice. I live in one city in one country, and you live…probably not here. I can talk about how to manage and interview accountants, but not about specific accounting methods. Find the right support people, like accountants and lawyers and so on. Take their advice. Whatever you do, be legal.

      The closer your business is to mine, the better my advice will fit you. If you’re starting a business that caters to creatives, such as a store or a web site, a book on retail business would help you more than this one. The business of selling beads or journals or paint, while much cooler and more vital than selling mere food and shelter, isn’t that much different from any other retail. Reading this book can help you talk with your customers, though, and you should certainly maintain

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