IP : Coaching from Sidelines

Running a successful creative business is exceptionally difficult. As a professional artist, one things cold difficult experience has taught me is the business of art is nothing like anything I was told the first 20 years of my life.

Accomplishing success as both an artist and entrepreneur is exceptionally rare, and must be acquired through either chance or hard-earned self-education (recommended reading: "Business and Legal Forms for Graphic Designers"). When persons tell me the optimal ways to run my business, I tend to cringe. More often than not, either myself, or someone I know well has tried these models, and learned from cold hard experience that not only do they not work (or at least not for the reasons people think), but this approach typically results in the artist getting burned and exploited heavily in the process.

It's not like I don't appreciate or want the assistance, hell, I consider the best feature of my art audience contributions. The problem being more along the dynamics of everyone thinking they're more qualified to be the football coach than the guy who is actually coaching the football team.

Until a person can demonstrate that they know how successful art businesses actually work (and no, not the kind of mythos you'd find in "how video games are made articles"), or better yet put their money where their mouth is and run their own business that way, I won't see much reason to take your advice, versus all of the other bad advice I've already been burned by.

Label me cynical if you like, but then do your research and ask why websites like the following and many others exist:

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