S2E5: For artists with chronic conditions: Licensing art to hotels as a supportive revenue stream

If you’re an artist living with a chronic condition, this episode is from someone in the same boat. I share how licensing art for hotels and corporate spaces has allowed me to earn income with less physical effort, fewer demands, and more room for my health.

00:39 The Challenges of Traditional Art Sales
02:21 The Benefits of Licensing Art to Consultants
03:13 Component 1: Less Marketing Effort
05:34 Component 2: Easy Communication
07:09 Component 3: No Hard Physical Labor
10:16 Component 4: Major Financial Potential
12:21 Managing Income and Financial Stability
14:10 Conclusion and Next Steps

Your next steps

• Listen to "Licensing art for Hotels"
• Listen to "Why working with art consultants is perfect for introverted artist with social anxiety"
• If it feels like the next right move for you, dive into "How to License Your Art for Hotels" guide
  

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Quietly Thriving Artist. I'm your host, Patricia Vargas, and in today's episode, I'm gonna share with you how licensing your art to art consultants for hotels and other corporate projects can support you as an artist with a chronic condition. And so I started thinking about this topic because I am currently in a flare from my own condition, which then led me to think about how

[00:00:29] thankful I am to have a revenue stream that supports my need to rest and recover while also helping to keep my business afloat. And I really want other artists who are in a similar position that I am to know that selling online or selling in fairs and markets, which I personally haven't done, but I know that it's a popular option for many artists, that these more traditional routes aren't the only way to create a business.

[00:00:59] around our art. And this stuff is really great for when we're feeling well, like selling online and doing fairs and markets and those kinds of things. But when we're not feeling our best, and if we don't have any other sources of income, it can add stress to our already stressed-out bodies and minds. And so tell me if you can relate to this, but when my online shop was the main focus of my business, whenever I had to take time off or step away, I always felt really guilty because there was a bajillion things that I needed to do, and I just sometimes physically couldn't do them.

[00:01:37] And instead of allowing myself to rest, I kept pushing through because I felt that if I wasn't physically working and driving traffic to my business on a consistent basis, then I felt like I wasn't making any money. And money, whether we like it or not, is a big component of running a business, and it often can be one of the biggest stressors about running a business.

[00:02:03] And so, like cash flow is always a concern, right? You need to make enough each month to not only pay your business bills, but to also buy supplies and anything else that your business needs, and then hopefully have some money left over to pay yourself. And so for people like us, I think it's important to have at least one revenue stream that doesn't demand so much from us.

[00:02:31] This could be a passive income of some sort, or it could be what I like to call a low effort, high value revenue stream, and I would consider licensing to art consultants to be in this camp. It's not necessarily passive income. There are parts about it that are passive, but there's still work involved. It just doesn't involve any heavy labor, and I believe that it's a gentler way of making money from your art.

[00:03:01] Okay, so let's dive into how licensing your art to art consultants for hotels and other corporate projects can support artists like you and me. So there are four main components. One, there's less marketing. Two, there's easy communication. Three, there's no hard physical labor. And then four, there's major financial potential overall, but also from a single project.

[00:03:27] So let's start with the first one. So we know that marketing requires a large amount of time and energy, and if you've been in business for any length of time, then you know that this can easily be one of the biggest parts of your daily routine, even more so than creating the actual art. But when you're chronically ill, your capacity is already limited,

[00:03:51] and marketing can often take precedence over creating your art because if you don't market, then people aren't aware of who you are or what you offer. And then it's hard to make sales if people don't know that you exist. But when you're licensing to our consultants, marketing isn't really a major part of the agenda because this is a different kind of game.

[00:04:14] This revenue stream isn't about amassing a large following or even signing on a bunch of consultants all at once. It's about making individual connections with consultants, and you really only need like a few to start with, and then letting those. Relationships blossom naturally. So one project with a consultant can lead to more projects with that same consultant,

[00:04:39] if they like working with you. They can even recommend your art to their colleagues, which can then lead to even more projects. And this is exactly what happened to me. So one consultant introduced me to several others in her company, and then I got a bunch of projects in a very short amount of time. So essentially marketing as taught by the online gurus is not really relevant here because there are other low-commitment ways to build these connections if you currently don't have any, without posting every day on Instagram or TikTok and then stressing about missing a day or trying to build this giant email list.

[00:05:22] I give you a detailed overview of the low-commitment activities that you can do inside of my guide. Okay, so let's move on to the second component, which is easy forms of communication. So in my experience, most of the work with our consultants is done. Over email, and I talk about this in “Why Licensing to art consultants is a great option for introverted artists” episode, but it's equally relevant to those of us with chronic conditions because email is a fairly low-effort task.

[00:05:55] You can do it on your phone, you can do it on your laptop, and you don't need to answer immediately. Though you should respond in a timely manner, but there is a bit of a time buffer there, which is really nice. And if for like whatever reason you know that you can't properly respond that day, say that they're requesting some info and you just cannot bring yourself to get all that stuff together and then put it in an email, you can have a handy template saved that just lets them know that you saw their email and that you're gonna review it and then give them a day from when they can hear back from you.

[00:06:32] That way it doesn't look like you are ignoring them, and it gives them an expectation of when they can hear back, but it also gives you a little bit more time to respond when you're feeling a little bit better. And then you don't have to go into any of the details about why you can't respond right now.

[00:06:49] Just a little side note addition to that topic. My only other suggestion here is to not to wait too long, because they do often have deadlines that they need to meet, and you don't want to seem unprofessional and take an entire week to respond. I would say just give yourself a buffer of a couple of days at most.

[00:07:09] Alright, and the last two are no hard physical labor and major financial potential, which these two things together are what makes this a low effort, high value revenue stream. So if you remember my licensing or totals episode, this process at its core, like if you were to really boil it down to its bare essentials, is fairly simple.

[00:07:34] Let's do a quick recap. So a consultant wants to license your art for a hotel or a corporate project, and you answer the questions over email, and then if they decide to move forward, you sign a contract, send an invoice, you get paid, and then you send them the high-resolution file of your artwork. And that's the whole process in a nutshell.

[00:07:54] And I would say that this entire process takes maybe like an hour total, but it's spread over many weeks and sometimes over many months. But overall, this means that you don't have to physically produce anything. You don't have to print. Frame or package the final product. You don't have to pay to outsource it either, which is nice.

[00:08:19] So for example, if a hotel plans to use your art in 200 of their guest rooms, you don't have to print and package 200 art prints. They are paying for access to your high-resolution file. That is what you're really selling them. You are selling them access and permission. And I absolutely love this aspect about licensing because I can imagine just how burnt out I would feel if I had to print, cut, and package 200 art prints to meet a deadline during a flare.

[00:08:53] And even if I wasn't in a flare, doing that much would probably send me into one pretty quickly. And so, the less physical work that I have to do, the easier it is for me to maintain a more stable health condition. And this may be true for you, too. Additionally, not only do you not have to physically make anything, you also don't have to constantly crank out new work all of the time.

[00:09:20] I have noticed that most of my consultants have chosen artworks that are a year or older, and because you can rely on your older artwork, you don't have to feel like you're lagging behind if you've taken some time off from creating. Your older artwork still has a ton of value, and this business model really lets you keep making money from the work that you've already done.

[00:09:46] Alright. And so that's where all of the low-effort part of that comes into play. Now let's talk about the high-value part. And before I move forward, let me preface this by saying that how much you get paid depends entirely on how much you charge and how much they accept, as well as the scope of the project.

[00:10:09] So I'm speaking from my own personal experience, but obviously yours is gonna be unique to you. Okay, so by now, you know that art consultants are the ones with all of the big clients, like major hotels, restaurants, bars, cruise ships, all that kind of stuff. And sometimes their clients are gonna need a ton of artwork, and that's an opportunity for artists like you and me to make a good chunk of money from a single project.

[00:10:37] Like I've had a hotel project where they made 120 copies of my art, and I got paid a few thousand dollars for that. Then there are other projects that are super high volume, meaning that the number of copies that they plan to make from your art is somewhere in the five hundreds, eight hundreds, a thousand or more, and so your check would scale that much more.

[00:11:01] Now, let me say that these bigger projects, they sound so far away, they sound unattainable, and I'm gonna be honest that they don't happen all the time. It's not like each project that I get is a high-volume project, like the one where they made 120 copies. But they're not as rare as you think, and more importantly, the potential is always there.

[00:11:23] And so these high-volume projects can yield a big payoff with little physical work. Again, most of the work is done over email, and then they're paying for the access to your high-resolution file. And so this business model can be a strong pillar of support for artists with chronic conditions because it injects your business with some extra cash flow.

[00:11:48] What's more is that there are no additional costs associated with the payout of each project. So what I mean by that is that if you get paid $10,000, that's how much goes into your bank account. You know, minus any transaction fees if they pay through like an invoicing system or something like that. But if you're getting paid $10,000 and a $10,000 goes into your bank account, that is more usable cash that you then get to decide what you wanna do with.

[00:12:21] Even if you don't get high-volume projects right away, if you get smaller projects throughout the year, that can also really add up in terms of revenue. And if you couple that with good money management practices, then that can also have a positive impact on your business. And so, like when I get big influxes of cash, I don't see it as.

[00:12:43] bonus pay. I don't just like, okay, “I made $10,000, now it's time to put $10,000 into my personal bank”. I squirrel away a large portion of that for slower months where cash flow is gonna be a little bit tight. That way, if my expenses outshine my income for the month, I don't really panic because I know that I have this little reserve to cover everything, and that's just how I do it.

[00:13:08] I am not a financial expert by any means. You know, if you have any questions about managing your money, please consult with a pro. Okay? But let's get back to you. So let's say that to start, you make an extra $5,000 from this revenue stream. Think about what would that extra cash allow you to do in terms of supporting your health?

[00:13:33] Would it feel easier to take time off? Would it make your rest and recovery feel more restorative if you didn't have to worry about marketing and generating sales for a little bit? What if you made an extra $10,000 or $20,000? And again, I'm not making any income guarantees because like I said, this will depend on how much you charge.

[00:13:53] And I don't want to paint this as a fairy tale solution because, like with anything, there are some drawbacks to this process, which I might talk about in a different episode, but I have personally seen and felt the potential of this additional income stream. It has changed the way I feel about taking time off when I need to, and really licensing in general has taught me that working more and working harder doesn't always equal earning more, and that it's possible for people like us who have limited capacity to build a business around our art that doesn't always result in burnout or sacrificing our health in the process.

[00:14:36] Okay. If this episode has sparked some questions about how you can license your art to art consultants for hotel projects, I have a beginner's guide that goes into more detail about how this all works and how you can get started, and there's a link to it in the show notes if this feels like the next right move for you.

[00:14:57] That is it for me. If you have enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing or sharing it with a fellow artist. Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you over in the next one.