Recently I’ve begun a year-long,15-day program with the Institute for Civic Leadership, which trains people in facilitative leadership skills for the community of Greater Portland, Maine. In thirteen years of training, I’m their first artist, and the only person to come as an individual rather than a representative of a business, government, non-profit or other organization.

In our first session, one activity required us to divide into sectors - private (business), public (government - municipal, schools, etc.) and community (non-profit and everybody else). “Choose the sector where you spend the most time,” the facilitator directed, for those of us with multiple affiliations. “Do you mean where you do most of your leadership?” I asked, feeling baffled about where I belonged. “No, where you work,” I was told. “You would be with the private sector.” The PRIVATE sector?!? I looked over at the gathering group (mostly male) - people from utility, cable, manufacturing, insurance, finance and other business companies. My eyes wide and mouth open, I stared at them, thinking, I’m not one of them!! Stunned, I followed the group to our meeting room. I’m a business?!

Of course, I know rationally that I am a business. I’ve been self-employed for most of the past twenty-five years. I file Schedule C on my tax form. My earnings support our family. But I never think of myself in those terms. The revelation was an enormous paradigm shift, so big that it registered physically in my expression and my reeling mind. Since then I’ve been excited about the creative energy that might be released by this new perspective, this unexplored territory. It feels as if a fierce gust of wind slammed a door open in my brain. What’s beyond that new threshold?

The purpose of business is to make money, or in other words, “The business of business is business.” That’s the proverbial bottom line. Though I hope and plan to continue to make a living from my book work, it never seems to be the raison d’etre for doing it. The money sometimes feels almost like an extra perk or an unintended bonus, as in “I can’t believe I get paid to do this!” It’s not that the pay isn’t a major consideration in any project I undertake, it’s just that the project itself, the work, is more engaging. The money makes it possible for me to support myself so I can keep illustrating books. Getting paid is the means to the end of getting to do the work. In business, it seems to me, it’s the opposite: the work, the service, the product, is the means to the end, which is making money.

So what might happen if I shook things up once in awhile by thinking “like a business”? Of course I’ve done projects from time to time just because I needed the money. But I think I can state unequivocally that I have never done my best work under those circumstances, and, in fact, that the few projects I’d rather forget, the ones that make me wince when I remember them, were all done just for the money.

There’s a way in which this kind of thinking creates a dichotomy that’s problematic. The tendency can be to equate doing the work you love with scarcity - starving artist and all that. And, conversely, if you are getting paid very well, you must be selling out. This leaves you with the options of integrity while living in the chaos of money worries, or achieving comfort through prostitution, hardly a desirable pair of choices. What if both integrity and profitability were possible? What if I honored the work I was passionate about by thinking strategically enough to make sure I got paid well for it?

So, how do I support the work I love with a solid foundation, a more productive, efficient and profitable business? The answers are unique to each individual, but for myself I can immediately make a To Do list by remembering the things - business practices, really - that I’ve intended to do but never gotten around to (there always seems to be something more urgent or more “creative”): 1. Follow up on all promising contacts - editors, art directors, mentors, others authors and illustrators, bookstores, etc. - from conferences, portfolio showings, book tours, industry news, etc. Keep in touch (with book announcements, postcards, new art samples) with really promising ones indefinitely. 2. Create a website!! (My friend Toni Buzzeo, author and school librarian, says it’s now the first place schools look for information on an author or illustrator.) 3. Make business cards!! 4. Read publisher news with an eye to where my work fits in, and actually send samples/manuscripts/letters when I find a likely opening. 5. Add market evaluations to the ingredients in my creative brew for inspiring new book ideas.

Even as I write this, I realize I’ve already begun #5. This spring I spoke at a children’s book conference sponsored by the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. The market report session was given by Kirsten Cappy, everyone’s favorite local children’s book maven (now free-lancing at Curious City: Where Kids and Books Meet - curiouscity.net). She reported on sales for Longfellow Books in Portland, Maine, noting that 67% of her bestsellers were by Maine authors or illustrators or set in Maine. In conclusion, she told us, “Be a local author where you live.” This time I really heard the advice and let it go in deep, pondering what it meant to me. So, in the midst of my books taking readers to the African continent, Cambodia, Korea, the multicultural U.S., and on a global tour of walls, I’m slowly crafting a book to express my love for this 5-mile-round island in Casco Bay that has been home to me and my family for 23 years.

It seems a promising sign that this first market-inspired idea is one I can put so much love into. Meanwhile, on to designing that website and those business cards!

Published in newsletter of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators.
(Reproduced with permission.)