Penny Stackin'

I dunno about you, but sometimes when I get anxious I decide it's time to make a little graph.

I joked with my partner that this behavior feels like stacking my pocket change. "Look! I can make a pyramid! Or a square! Ooh this one has rust on it, but the other one doesn't! I WILL CATALOGUE THEM." It's fun, but at the end of the day it doesn't change the fact that I'm just stacking five pennies as many ways as I can.

BUT THIS IS DIFFERENT, I PROMISE. IT REALLY MIGHT HELP.

Like most cartoonists who take on graphic novels for publishers, I’m doing a very specific dance: how do I support myself month to month while working on a giant creative project that won’t give me another payday until I’ve finished it? (Bonus Challenge: how do I do this while also taking care of an aging parent??? Best leave that part alone for now.)

The sinking feeling I've had about money over the past year was borne out by my annual tax reckoning. I need to be earning more than I am right now in order to keep myself from eating into my savings while I draw this book. Not a ton more, because I'm fortunate enough to not be paying rent while I look after my dad, but at least $700 a month more. That's not pocket change.

So I started to catalogue the data. This is mostly a self-soothing exercise, but I find it can lead to useful insights.

First stop: monthly averages for each main income stream for the last 12 months.

(I actually extrapolated 701 because I only started working for them in October, but that's the average based on the last five months.)

Once I had the numbers down, I wanted to think about these different streams beyond their basic percentage of my total income. There are pros and cons to all of them, but some are going to be more fulfilling or sustainable than others. Hence: the orange categories!

I'm no data science buff, so I was just throwing words around to see what felt right. I know there are jobs that require more logistical energy and jobs that interrupt my day-to-day routine. Income opportunities that are very infrequent and others that can be relied upon like clockwork. So what does it look like if I put those things in a graph? Will it help me decide where to try and come up with that extra $700?

There's a lot I could pick apart from this image, like the split between income streams that require at least some involvement with social media and (rather new for me) income streams that do not. As a chronically self-employed person, it's novel having a part-time job where I do logistical tasks on an hourly basis for a client who pays me a consistent wage, month after month. IMAGINE!

This is semi-related to the split between direct and indirect income. Direct income is like "I drew this picture/organized this spreadsheet/walked this dog, it took four hours, pay me money." Indirect income is like "I posted this thing to Instagram and talked to this stranger at the supermarket about my comics and sold something to someone at a convention five years ago and sent a copy of my newsletter and some or all or maybe even none of those things has resulted in an email telling me I have one new $2-a-month Patron."

Once I have that Patron, they're probably not going to go anywhere for a while, but to get them in the first place I feel like I have to do a three act mystical jig that involves a lot of choreography I don't fully know and will never understand. That's indirect income. And for a lot of my career I have had an ENORMOUS amount of tolerance for it! In fact I think having an enormous amount of tolerance for it has been what's helped me maintain such a loving and generally un-stressful relationship with Patreon as a platform. It's all a gift. I don't need anything from it, but it also manages to be the most nourishing and sustainable (and sizable!) chunk of my income.

I really don't want that to change.

Based on what I'm seeing here, the biggest things I'm going to focus on are:

• Short-term: Setting a quota to actually clock 15-20 hours at the part-time job each week
• Mid-term: Reprinting all my minicomics, out-of-stock postcards, and (DRUMROLL) 100 Demon Dialogues books, so I can start earning more from Buyolympia sales and (perhaps? one day??) conventions (Bonus: finishing and releasing What She Knows, my long-suffering 2020 100 Day Project card deck, which I imagine will also become a sustainable source of income once it's out in the world)
• Long-term: Deprioritizing freelance work in favor of getting Seacritters done as swiftly as possible! Gotta save up my creative juices to get to that next payout!!

GAZE UPON MY PENNIES, YE MIGHTY, AND DESPAIR.

Okay that's enough of that.

Hope it was helpful.

Love you all.

Bye bye.

L