Turning Creative Passions Into a Career – Should You Do It?
You DON'T have to monetize your creative practice for it to have value. But here are 7 reasons why you might.
Monetizing what you love to do creatively comes at a cost. Is it worth it for you?
If you’re a multifaceted creative like me, you’re juggling an endless stream of creative curiosities.
Sometimes, you’ll pick up one activity, try it out, and ultimately set it aside in favor of something else that offers new opportunities for learning and exploration.
Other times, you’ll fall deep into the rabbit hole with one creative practice. You might even stick with it for a while.
If you reach that point, you may start toying around with the idea of turning it into a business. Building a brand. Selling your work. Setting aside everything else, once and for all, to make this your “thing.”
You’ve heard many successful people sing the praises of finding something you love and making a living out of it. Could this be it?
But you've also heard the other camp of advice-givers who caution against monetizing your creative passions. So, how are you supposed to know what’s right for you?
Before you get too carried away and quit your day job, it can be helpful to think carefully about why you’re interested in generating income from your hobby.
Do you have to? Do you even want to? Will it ultimately help you reach your goals – or will it box you in and stifle your growth?
7 reasons why you might turn your creative skills and passions turn into income-generating activities
Below I’m highlighting some of the most common scenarios where it can make sense to try monetizing a creative practice.
Of course, everyone has their own reasons for going into business or staying away from the transactional side of things. You might even take a stab at capitalizing on your creativity if none of the following apply.
But hopefully, by reviewing some of these reasons, you can get a better feel for whether or not they apply to your situation and goals.
If none of these click with you, you might be a lot more content if you put that business idea on the back burner for now and just focus on your creative practice.
That said, let’s get into some of the top reasons why you might try leveraging your creativity as a source of income:
1. Because you want to make a living using an existing skill set and resource pool
Everyone has to make a living one way or another. If your skillset, network, reputation, and/or education point in the direction of pursuing creative work as a career, that might be a suitable path.
Additionally, if you’re creating work that’s already garnering attention – the kind of attention that comes with questions like, “How can I buy one?” – why not start selling and see if this can sustain you?
That might offer a more direct route to steady income than a career pivot toward something else.
What if you don't have a very well-developed skillset, network, or resource pool yet? Well, it may not be the best time to monetize what you're doing. You might find more stability in opportunities that are adjacent to your creative practice.
There's a reason creatives gravitate toward jobs in art galleries, bookstores, and B2B services. These gigs can sometimes provide the right balance of stability and stimulation, even if they’re not entirely centered around making original work.
2. Because you want to share your work with the world
No matter what you create, your “stuff” needs a home. If you ramp up your output, you can’t always keep it all.
Plus, sharing your work with others can provide some creative closure and catharsis.
You can certainly put your creations out there for free! But not all practices lend themselves well to this.
For instance, digital work is really easy to store and share. But extra-large canvases can take over a small workspace pretty quickly. Your friends and family can only absorb so many gifted oil paintings, after all.
At a certain point, your next avenue for getting things out there to people who’ll appreciate them is to sell them off.
3. Because you want to fuel and regulate your creative cycle
People who sell their creative work sometimes begin doing so to finance their activities and replenish their supplies.
They might also start selling to clear out the items they don’t want hanging around to make room for new creations. (Case in point: Those extra-large canvases.)
This can turn a creative hobby into something that looks and acts like a business. But success might look very different in this scenario. Sales figures and scalability may not be as important as keeping up the creative momentum.
One of my sewing teachers used to make crafty hair bows and other accessories with buttons and ribbons. She just loved creating them and eventually started selling them around town. Why? To clear out the older stock, recoup the cost of her supplies, and get them into loving hands. It was more about the creative enjoyment than the cash.
4. Because you want to continue doing the work you love
Even if your creative practice doesn’t take up much space, it might not be possible to sustain – or even start – as a hobby.
Imagine you’re an aspiring event planner. You might throw the most incredible parties for your family and friends, but those opportunities are few and far between. You can’t exactly walk up to strangers and offer to plan their baby showers and corporate receptions just for fun.
If you want to do something like that more often, you might consider setting up a business to bring legitimacy to what you're doing and help you secure exciting opportunities.
5. Because you can’t actually follow your creative passion without owning a business
You can try countless creative activities on a shoestring. But some projects are simply cost-prohibitive to carry out for free.
In certain cases, you may not even be able to get going without a business license.
Take my own jewelry business as an example. I wanted to develop a collection of fine jewelry, but I couldn’t actually contract the services of gem vendors and gold casting houses without owning an LLC.
For me, it was always more of a passion project than a sales-driven side hustle, although I wouldn’t have been able to get started without establishing a business.
6. Because you want to find community
One of the easiest ways to find like-minded creatives is to seek out people who are doing it for money. They’re constantly putting themselves out there to improve visibility among potential customers. That means they’re a lot easier to spot out in the wild than hobbyists.
Art fairs, conventions, networking events, daytime meetups, industry conventions, local business groups – all of these attract working creatives. If you want to mix and mingle with those folks, you may decide to develop a creative brand of your own.
7. Because you want another way of valuing your work
Plenty of people donate their creative energy all the time. Making handcrafted gifts, doing creative favors for friends, sewing quilts for a cause, posting illustrations on social media, doing poetry readings – the list goes on.
But not everybody wants to give everything freely, all the time. When so many creatives are faced with unpaid internships and messages around “doing it for the exposure,” it can feel a little punk to make boatloads of money from your creative work.
If you’ve ever seen the massive queues of people with tickets to get into MeowWolf, you can assume the artists behind the experience are making decent money. They started out as starving artists and grew, grew, grew from there. Around 2018, the group reached a point where one of the co-founders talked about setting his sights on making it a billion-dollar business.
A billion-dollar business around weird, immersive art. Why not! (And they got there, too!)
Monetizing your creative passion: Is it the right step?
Do any of these reasons resonate with you? Or are your goals completely different from what’s listed above?
If you’re a multifaceted creative, you might prioritize play and exploration over fueling one type of activity. Maybe you’ll be better served by making than monetizing right now.
Or, you may be searching for community and a way to close the creative cycle by getting your work out there. In that case, setting up shop could help you reach your goals.
There’s no right or wrong way to do it, as long as you stay true to yourself and follow the path that will bring you the most creative joy possible!