You’re a creative, and you fear making money from your work. You hate the idea of selling. You think the corrupting forces of capitalism will degrade your work, make it less valuable, too commercial, unworthy of critical praise. Thinking about money is a distraction from your artistic or social mission. And above all, you’re frightened of what people will think of you: that you’re too materialistic, self-promotional, just in it for the money. You’re not alone.
Many creative people feel this way. This is the fear of selling out. Unfortunately, this fear often leads creators to produce large bodies of work without thinking about how that work will be sustained. We can all name a website, podcast, or YouTube channel we thoroughly enjoyed, only to see it run out of steam because it lacked a realistic plan to support the creative effort. Creative work is, after all, an economic activity, full of opportunity costs and directly tied to socio-economic status.
The person working seven days a week to support his family finds it more difficult to start and manage a podcast than the well-paid professional who has Saturday mornings free to “strategize” his content because he doesn’t have to tend to his own trees and bushes.
Creative work needs economic support. To most this is obvious. Yet despite this understanding, many creatives, in their distaste and distrust of the market, distance themselves from the systems and strategies that would support their work.
Is it really selling out to use market forces to sustain and amplify your work? Where does this fear come from? And how do you overcome it?
Why we fear making money
What frightens a creative person away from using market forces to share work with a wider audience?
There are different reasons. The person may be suffering from imposture syndrome, an unwarranted fear of rejection. The work’s not good enough. I’m not good enough. Other people say this and do this much better than I ever will.
Maybe the task of learning to create within an digital economy seems daunting or flat-out dull. Can’t I just create something valuable and let it sell itself?
Perhaps the content creator is participating in a different type of market, one that obscures the economic connection. For example, a professor who shares their work with the public through a digital project is likely to list that project on their C.V., and maybe even use the project to inform their research—activities that are directly tied to their status within the academic job market.
But my guess is that creatives, who often have a background in the liberal arts, owe their fear to the influence of critical theory.
Before I discuss how critical theory is tied to the fear of making money, let me state that I believe strongly in the value of critical theory, and it underlies much of the analysis that students do in my English Composition courses. There is tremendous value in critiquing the societal structures that exploit people in vulnerable positions and hinder social and economic justice.
A capitalist society functions best against a system of checks and balances, and critical literacy is a key component of a balanced system. Critical consumers can pressure businesses to abide by better ethics. Critical citizens can pressure congress to codify those ethics into laws and regulations. And critically-aware audiences protect themselves against the misleading claims of disingenuous advertising, fight back against demeaning representations of women and minorities in the media, and forge more competent distinctions between news and entertainment. (Indeed, with the rise of fake news and the truth-bending allure of pop culture and pop personality, a critical lens is ever more crucial).
But at a time when the means of media production are no longer solely in the hands of the elite, critical theory is not the sole tool for influencing change. Barriers are lowered, and now it is more possible to not only critique the market, but to participate in it in a way that adheres to critical values.
The Responsibility of Overcoming the Fear
Many creators have set this fear aside. And the numbers are growing. We see them in the nonprofit organizations using traditional and internet marketing principles to expand their reach. We see them in social enterprises which leverage capital to make a difference in a community or for a disadvantaged demographic. The fiction writers building their own platforms, the former philosophy students sharing their passion with a larger community and teaching people who might otherwise never have heard of Kant or Bentham or Richard Rorty . We even see them in many of the small online businesses whose leaders have figured out that transparency, honesty, collaboration, and quality content is not just good for people—it happens to also be good for business.
But though the possibility has never been greater, neither has been the responsibility, for the same digital tools and strategies that allow principled creators to share their message or product also allow unscrupulous shysters and mountebanks to share theirs. (A recent article in the Atlantic reminds us of the even darker side to this unprecedented access to media tools.)
Creatives, then, have a responsibility to put good work out there, whether to entertain, inspire positive change, solve problems—or all of the above.
Maintaining Your Purpose
Of course, there is the reasonable fear that money can corrupt the creative process, and it can—if you let it. We’ve had our fill of examples, from the constant re-hashing of vapid factory-produced pop songs, to the shallow click-bait web articles that, at best, represent nothing more than a waste of writing talent.
When I think of money at the expense of art, I think of certain Elvis Presley movies, formulaic and streamlined to maximize profit, shot in just a few weeks, little regard given to expressive development. Many Elvis fans lament this period in his career, wishing that he had been given better roles or, like me, wondering what more live performances in the 60’s would have looked like.
But we also have plenty of counterexamples. No one questions the artistic development of the Beatles after they made it big. In fact, success allowed them the freedom and comfort to experiment. When asked whether success affected his and Paul’s writing, John Lennon famously replied, “No, it’s easier to write with cushions…than on pieces of hard bench.” Most would agree that success didn’t hinder the writing.
Many of his followers were certain that Bob Dylan had sold out to commercial interests when he went electric in Newport, but almost no one would argue that the integrity of his art that followed, culminating in the mind-altering Blonde on Blonde, was polluted by commercial interests—the Nobel Committee for Literature certainly didn’t think so.
So while commercial interest can indeed compromise the integrity of your art, it doesn’t have to, as long as you keep it in its proper place. Your success depends on how you answer the question: do I create to earn money, or do I earn money so I can continue to create?
Your audience will know how you’ve answered this question. It will manifest in the content you put out. And though it can be difficult to maintain the right balance, we have many examples to look to. More and more creative entrepreneurs are demonstrating and reaffirming the principle that if you put the needs of your audience first, business success will take care of itself.
Many are also shedding the fear of asking for support, whether through products, memberships, or donations, and finding that there are many people out there willing to spend a few bucks to keep the podcast running, the camera clicking, the video streaming, and the music playing.