Okay, you gotta realize I’m not a working artist. It isn’t my “thing”, even as a hobbyist.

However, you charge as much as you can get, and that’s because you might not sell another. If you’re stuck in capitalist hell as an artist, it’s like being a pro athlete, an actor, or other job that has limited duration as a career, or where you can’t guarantee the next job. If your work has the attention of people that hoard money until they can pay hundreds of thousands, you fucking charge that. Doesn’t matter what medium you work in.

Art should be something done for joy or situation expression, not a commodity. But it’s a time consuming process that requires physical resources, lots of practice, and it takes that while not being practical. So there’s always going to be a push and pull over allocating resources for it. The more you shift a system towards only giving resources to necessary things, the more art becomes scarce and hard to produce. But art has intangible benefits that can’t be directly quantified into a spreadsheet, so even the strictest utilitarian thinking needs to allow for it, or we lose those benefits.

The system is broken, and the absurdity of the art market is proof of that. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still have value just as much as movies, sports, writing, or other non necessary acts.

With that out of the way, the best I ever did with visual media was about 250 USD. Single painting, fairly big. I had about thirty bucks of supplies in it, plus three weeks of work, doing about two hours a day most days, with some of the fine work being eight plus hours. I didn’t calculate it based on that, it was a price negotiated at time of sale that was as low as I was willing to go despite that price being the first sale, with a commission for two more at different prices. If it had been a one off, I wouldn’t have gone that low.

The other two were smaller, and got 200 each.

So, not that much. Then again, I’m not much of a painter. Not even mid tier at my best.

Now, if you want to take all the arts together, I’ve done better.

Writing is as much an art as painting or other visual media. I’ve sold two novels traditionally, plus self published another. All combined, I got less than I did for the paintings.

But I used to do custom fiction. Erotica in specific. And that makes bank as long as you’re willing to be kink friendly. Since I was and am, I could charge as much as a dollar a word. And that was over a decade ago.

It was erratic work for sure. I would get requests for short pieces maybe once a month. Longer pieces, say novella length maybe once or twice a year. Novel length was only a few times, and the last one I did brought in 20k for around 75k words. You have to charge less for bigger volumes because it gets too far above what the market will bear. You try charging a dollar a word for a novel, you limit your customer base to people that can drop between 60 and 80k in one or two lumps. There just weren’t enough people like that looking for custom erotica.

With the long form, there’s also more work, so a higher price could be justified. If you’re making up something the length of a big magazine article, all you really have to do is have a decent grasp of what turns people on, then sprinkle in some of whatever it is that the specific person is into. You might need to do a few days of research for a kink you’ve never heard of, but the more you do, the less that’s needed.

But a novel? You have to know the kink, if a kink is involved, so you’ll be researching things for much longer. For a short story, your initial contact and discussion might take an hour of asking questions to personalize the piece a novel, and you can expect to need to talk back and forth for the equivalent of a full shift of work. You need those details, that understanding of what they want out of the story beyond the sex scenes. A short story doesn’t need much beyond the sex. Short erotica is essentially porn, gonzo porn in some cases. Long form erotica, you have to have a real story to tell, not just setting a scene for sex.

Plus, there’s a greater expectation when someone is dropping a car’s worth of cash. So you have to edit more. And you’ll end up doing that out pf necessity as well, because the longer the piece is, the more typos are going to creep in. That’s extra true for me, dealing with dyslexia.

After the first few times, I wouldn’t even entertain the possibility of doing the work for less than a grand for a short story.

But that all dried up as the internet got bigger and more people were dumping their fantasies into fiction for free.