Pick the career of your choice.  Most likely, you can find a good education on that career at the school of your choice.  They’ll teach you all of the theory, the techniques, etc.  Chances are, tho, they’re not going to do as good job as they might in teaching you how to turn all of that knowledge into a successful career.  Sure, if you graduate and find yourself work at a studio and the like, you can shield yourself to some extent from having to know what’s really going on.  But, if you want to go off on your own and make a living as an independent artist, you pretty much have to learn at least the basics of how to run a business.  Well, you don’t have to, but your chances of being successful are probably going to be severely limited if you don’t know how to manage the business side of your artwork.

So, what to do?

Well, If you’re lucky, you know someone who is already a working artist, and can help you learn the ins and outs of setting up and running a business.  If not, you can find yourself one of the workshops that are taught by working artists, who will teach you the basics of the business of art.  And failing that, you can visit your local library or bookstore and look for books about the business of art.

Every art medium is a little bit different than every other in how you go about selling your work and maintaining your business.  Luckily, they also have a lot of things in common.  No matter what kind of art you create and sell, you’re going to need to keep track of your income and expenses; that’s a basic part of any business, whether you’re selling sculpture, water colors, or diesel engines.  You can keep track of it on lots of pieces of paper, or in something like a computer spreadsheet, or in bookkeeping software, ie, something like Intuit Quickbooks and the like (not a recommendation, just an example).  You spend more as you go up the ladder of tools, but you gain the advantages of those tools.

Beyond basic bookkeeping, you need to be able to keep track of the mechanics of your business. That is, you need to keep track of what you have, who you sold things to, where you sold them, contacts you’ve established, etc.  Once again, you can keep track of these things on pieces of paper or a spreadsheet program.  And for very, very small businesses, that might be fine.  General bookkeeping systems can keep track of inventory, but they lack the nuances that make every kind of business unique.  For example, in the world of photography, you’ve got software systems that do something called “digital asset management”, and is called DAM software (provide your own jokes here…..).  I’ve worked in photography, and what you see in the world of photography are artists who have seemingly vast inventories of images.  If you get a notice that Joe’s World of Nature is looking for pictures of laughing gazelles for their next cover, you have to be able to find those images quickly and get them to the publisher, while keeping track of who has your images.  That’s what DAM software does.  In the world of fine art photography, and other limited edition art media, you still need to keep track of where you’re artwork is at, but you’re also tracking things like gallery connections, art fairs, etc.  The needs are similar, but different.  And there are software systems, like WorkingArtist and a handful of others, who fit that niche of specialized use.

The main point here isn’t to go out and buy yourself a lot of software gadgets to run your business.  What you do need to do, tho, is maximize the potential that your business has to be successful, and that’s what these tools do.  Whether you’re working from a legal pad, or a spreadsheet, or a good software program, you’re looking for ways to ease the burden of tracking all the things that have to be tracked in order to squeeze every bit of potential income from your business.  Like it or not, you have to do these things in order to give yourself the best chance of being successful.  It’s worth a bit of your time to review your options and pick the best tools for your business.