Blog / 2025 / “How Do You Make Money with Your Art?”

Even though I’ve been paying my rent with my art for decades now, I get asked this question all the time. Today, I want to answer it once and for all, because I think that, if people understood how judgy the question really is, they’d stop asking it.

The question:

How do you make money with your art?

My answer:

Do you like it when people ask you how much money you make?

Usually, the person who’s questioning me this way is a teacher, a therapist, an engineer, or anyone with a job that everyone agrees you should be paid to do. For that reason, I can’t simply respond to them with the same question they asked me.

Instead, my query is a close cousin of theirs, and it’s meant to help them understand how crappy it is to have the value of one’s labor questioned.

Next time you or anyone you know gets curious about how an artist makes money with their art, ask the Internet instead. There aren’t a ton of different ways to make a living as an artist, and I, for one, have written about it extensively over the years. In fact, this post was among the top results when you Googled the question from 2010 (when I published the original version it) until around 2018.

I think the more interesting question to ask yourself whenever you meet an artist is:

Did their art bring me joy or make me think?

If the answer is “yes” then figure out how you can pay the artist for the service they’ve done for you. Art is labor, and most artists don’t get paid for that labor often enough. It’s up to each of us to support the artists whose work we want to see in the world.

If that feels like an unfair burden to place on you, I agree. But at this point, with the Trump administration doing its best to gut funding for any culture it doesn’t explicitly agree with, we have no other mechanism for ensuring that independent artists can make a living with their work.

If you want to support my art, writing, and videos, you can:

Tip me once!

Tip me every month!

For the last ten years, I’ve received automatic monthly donations from around a hundred people. Many of them give a few dollars, a few of them give $30 or more, and, all together, their regular support changed my life.