I tend not to use the word “artist” to describe myself.\u00a0 Not that I think it doesn’t apply, but sometimes I feel its a title I haven’t earned yet. \u00a0 But despite my hesitation, artist is an accurate term for what I am.<\/p>\n
There’s been some noise out there lately about what it costs to be an artist, and whether artists “deserve” to make or keep the money they make, or if the expenses they incur are “worth it”.<\/p>\n
Case in point, the recent explosion of controversy regarding Jack Conte of Pomplamoose laying out what they made and what they spent on their recent tour<\/a>.\u00a0 Reading the article, it’s pretty straightforward stuff.\u00a0 They paid their backing band and support staff fairly, slept in hotels and ate relatively decently. The tone of the article is informative.\u00a0 Despite reporting a net loss on the tour, Conte doesn’t come off as bitter or upset, and he’s not shaking the hat to cover his losses.\u00a0 He’s mostly just saying, “Hey, touring isn’t exactly a huge windfall, even when you’re doing objectively well.”<\/p>\n There’s been backlash, of course, saying that they shouldn’t have slept in hotels, shouldn’t have paid the backing band a salary, etc.\u00a0 I wonder if these are the very same people who complained that Amanda Palmer<\/a> wasn’t paying volunteers she invited to join them onstage.\u00a0 Certainly, the same websites took these contradictory opinions.\u00a0 Of course, it seems that many of those people think that musicians and other artists shouldn’t care<\/em> about money.\u00a0 It should be purely out of love and devotion to art as an abstract concept; rent and food be damned.<\/p>\n I don’t know much about the music industry, especially the more independent stuff.\u00a0 Hell, I never even heard of Pomplamoose before this.\u00a0 But I do know the cost-to-value calculations that have to be made as an artist.\u00a0 Back when I did theatre, I ate a LOT of costs, and never expected much more than hopefully making back what I spent, usually with actors who were equally there for the love.\u00a0 Make money?\u00a0 I don’t need to do that!<\/p>\n That attitude eventually let me to declaring bankruptcy.\u00a0 So I don’t do that sort of thing any more.<\/p>\n Fortunately, I don’t have too many up-front expenses as a traditionally-published writer.\u00a0 I’m not paying for editing, cover art, printing, etc. The prime thing I spend money on is going to conferences, so that’s travel expenses.<\/p>\n I don’t have to bring boxes of books to sell whenever I go anywhere, so one advantage I have is I don’t have to directly monetize any encounters I have with people there.\u00a0 But the flipside of that is I don’t have a direct number to look at and say, “Yes, going to this conference sold X units, so I made Y dollars, minus the amount that I spent to go, equals this much profit.”<\/p>\n There isn’t clear algebra of value.\u00a0 Instead, I have to derive the value– going to this conference probably netted me some new readers, and those readers might be the kind to tell other people to read me, etc.\u00a0\u00a0 Until I have a better sense of what my sales will be*, it’s a lot of guesswork.\u00a0 So right now, conference choices are based on my ability to minimize expenses, or alternatively, secondary value considerations that make going worth the expense.\u00a0 Case in point, my next conference, Boskone<\/a>, is in Boston, where my sister and her family live. So going to that one is win\/win.<\/p>\n But I’m pretty fortunate, in that I have the luxury to think about the value of such things in more abstract ways.\u00a0 A lot of artists, especially musicians, have<\/em> to accept that they’ll sleep in the van and subsist on tortilla chips in order to balance the books.\u00a0 And given those considerations, it really is incredible that they push through, that their love for their work is enough to keep them going.<\/p>\n Because when I’m going down into the word mines, I need a decent bed to sleep in at the end of the night.\u00a0 See you down there.<\/p>\n —<\/p>\n *- Kind of hard to gauge until the book actually, you know, comes out.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I tend not to use the word “artist” to describe myself.\u00a0 Not that I think it doesn’t apply, but sometimes I feel its a title I haven’t earned yet. \u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,1,18,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conventions","category-uncategorized","category-writing","category-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=601"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":603,"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601\/revisions\/603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}