How I Made Money as an Artist in 2023

If you’re anything like me, you love watching salary breakdown videos from other small businesses. I always find it so fascinating how different each business is, so if you’ve ever wondered how I made money as an artist you’ve come to the right spot!

2023 was interesting to say the least. I started the year off feeling really confident in going in a new direction with my business. I had decided to stop selling physical products and just be digital. After over 8 years of selling physical products, I was at a point where it just didn’t make sense anymore. I didn’t have enough space to hold all of my inventory, I had most of it still sitting at my moms house and she was ready to have her space back.

My confidence took a dive more than any other year, as if it was the accumulation of previous years all coming to a crash at once. I was ready to give up being creative at all, on so many occasions – so to still be here designing and making things is a win for me.

2023 overall income

My overall sales made up 51% – and I’m counting sales as anything I sold on my website or another platform that wasn’t wholesale. Freelance was 35%, wholesale was almost 13% (down from 42% in 2022), and affiliate sales was less than 1% – however, affiliate sales are super hard to track and I’ll get into that in a moment.

2023 sales breakdown

My sales numbers are made up of all of the platforms I sell on: Cricut, Tiktok, Shopify, Etsy, Design Bundles, Creative Fabrica, Creative Market, and Redbubble. In 2022, digital sales accounted for only 22% of my overall income. Which means that even if you take out the Tiktok earnings, my digital sales income doubled which surprised me – but a huge part of that is because of Cricut.

Out of all the platforms, Cricut is outshining all of them, and it’s almost 50% of my sales. And those numbers are only from mid-May to the end of the year. I’m making 7-8x more on Cricut each month than any other site in a short amount of time. I also reached a huge milestone by getting to 100,000 overall cuts in just 7 months!!

Now, I know I said I stopped selling physical products, but I had a bunch of inventory sitting at my mom’s house. On a whim I decided to add some stickers to TikTok Shop, and in one week I made over $2,000 from inventory I was getting ready to donate or throw out.

I know I wont have this income to rely on in 2024, but I’m confident Cricut will pick up the slack from that.

My next largest sales stream was Design Bundles, and this was ONLY because I was in one of their $1 deals in March or April. I made $1,000 from that sale, but besides that I was only making about $20-50 a month from them and was seriously doing really bad sales-wise compared to previous years.

But then the CEO shut down my shop. If you missed that, yeah that really happened. The former CEO saw I liked a post on LinkedIn about Design Bundles, and because of that my shop was shut down.

Creative Fabrica, Shopify, Etsy, and Creative Market are all doing about the same but I’m hoping my website and Etsy will pick up this year as I put more focus on them. I really did give Design Bundles all of my attention when it came to digital products, and if it took my shop getting shut down to be able to refocus then so be it.

2023 freelance breakdown

Freelance is something new I started doing this year, and somehow it became 35% of my income! Within my freelance category there are some reoccuring gigs, Upwork, one off tasks, and working for some small businesses.

At the beginning of the year I was doing freelance for Design Bundles, designing for their Plus Membership. And out of nowhere they fired tons of Plus Designers in April. So this was a big chunk of money that I was making that was just gone without any warning.

This year I started doing some videos for Creative Fabrica, which if you follow them you’ve probably seen! I get to make craft videos from time to time. It really opened up a new avenue of creativity for me that I hadn’t been doing before.

I started doing work for a couple small businesses, and that has been the most rewarding thing I’ve done this year. It also forced me to get into a routine and because of that my business started improving. I was getting back to being me again, and finding reasons to keep moving forward.

I did a few jobs on Upwork this year. It was at a time where I didn’t think designing was for me anymore and I was desperate to find anything to make money. It takes SO long to find decent jobs on Upwork, that that could be your part time job. It’s overwhelming and time consuming, but the couple jobs I did were a nice change of pace.

I also did a couple one off projects like making a custom font for another brand, which was really cool!

Overall, I do expect my freelance to go down in 2024, since I’ll be losing a big chunk of that. But it’s still a fun part of my business and I’m excited to see where it takes me in 2024.

2023 affiliate breakdown

So affiliate payments are really hard track for a variety of reasons. I have Amazon Affiliate income, which I can easily find. But Creative Market and Creative Fabrica lump their affiliate income into your earnings. With CM you can break it down and find that info. But with Creative Fabrica you can’t see the affiliate income at all; it’s just all lumped together.

predictions for 2024

So to wrap up this post I wanted to talk about some of my business predictions for the year. In a previous blog post I talked about my goals for 2024, but today I want to make some predictions. I think…

• Cricut will bring in part time income on a consistent basis.
• My website sales will increase.
• Freelance will stay about the same or increase just based on being an entire year. But it won’t be a full time gig.
• I will get monetized on Youtube but it won’t be a huge income stream this year (maybe next).

And those are my predictions for the year. Here’s to hoping 2024 is much better for my clarity, self confidence, and of course income.