How to make money as an artist

Fifteen years ago Ann Kullberg was a struggling artist with a handicapped son to care for. Today, she is the driving force behind the website annkullberg.com, which sells webinars, subscriptions, books and kits about coloured pencil artwork worldwide. She tells us her inspiring story.

George: How did you become an artist?

Ann: Well, because of circumstances. I had two small children. I was divorced. My son was very, very handicapped and ill. I had to work from home. I discovered coloured pencil as a fine art medium about the same time I needed to work from home. I exhibited one piece of work at a local fair and got first place. Then I just kind of dived in, got gallery representation and managed to eek out some sort of living for a while. Eventually, I started taking commissions for portraits.

George: Do you think your art career would have happened anyway, without such a specific set of circumstances?

Ann: I had always drawn as a child but I had never taken any art classes. I was always intimidated by them. I thought you had to be a good artist to take an art class. I didn't feel I was talented. I'm completely self taught. I always credit my son [for my career] because without him, I would certainly not be talking to you today.

George: It's always great to hear such an inspirational story

Ann: My life has really turned out in ways I would never have imagined.

George: How did you go from doing commissions and exhibiting work to starting a website?

Ann: I was asked by someone writing a book about their technique in coloured pencil to write a chapter for the book. He didn't do portraits. The publisher of his book saw my work, liked it and asked me if I would write a book on portrait techniques in coloured pencil. That was just unreal. I mean, at that point I'd been working commissions for about eleven years but coloured pencil is really slow. A portrait takes about 120 hours to complete.

George: Wow. That's four weeks!

Ann: Yes, and I had to get two done a month to cover the bills. I had sixty hour work weeks. For eleven years I'd been working in coloured pencil but really, really, really struggling financially. When they offered me the book, I just went crazy. I also decided I'd better have a website – this was fifteen years ago. I knew nothing about it. I mean nothing about it. My daughter told me it would be really easy to have a website. It seemed as though she lied to me! It was not easy to make a website if you knew nothing. However, it was a great thing because after the book was published, lots and lots of people visited my website and then I started a magazine because people wanted to learn online. That was sort of the beginning.

"I think the main ingredient for success is hanging in there; just not quitting."

George: Then you created an online magazine. You actually sold it at that point?

Ann: Yes, I sold it right away. I wrote to people who had sent me fan mail because of the book – about two hundred people. I think I charged $2.50 a month and charged for a year of subscription at once. I had fifty cheques in a couple of weeks. I thought, "These people must be wanting this." Really, fifteen years ago, there weren't many people online.

George: Where did you go from there?

Ann: I realised that now I had this following I could probably sell them stuff. I starting putting these tutorial kits together. Well, those just flew off the shelves! We would print and package them here. People really loved them. We just kept going. I think we must have close to forty kits now and a whole bunch of other products that I created over the years as I thought, "Oh, there's a need for this". I just turned my living room into an office manufacturing area and studio.

George: Wow. Great. You now sell by Shopify and use SendOwl to sell your digital products – kits, magazine subscriptions and so on. How did you end up using Shopify?

Ann: After Frontpage, I moved to Dreamweaver, but I had to build the website myself and do absolutely everything myself. I realised just last year that I couldn't continue to maintain that. I shopped around for something that would make my life a little bit easier. I went with Shopify but then realised they would not be able to deliver digital products, which I knew was going to be another way that I moved the business forward because people can download them so easily. Then I just fell in love with the Shopify apps. I'm like, "Wow, I can do this. I can do that. Or they can do this for me." The number one thing was that I needed to have an app to handle the magazine subscriptions. For the previous fouteen years, we'd been manually adding people to different email lists, depending on what kind of subscription they had, which basically meant tons of mistakes. I thought, well, Shopify works and I could see that SendOwl was beautiful. I just love how simple SendOwl is.

George: Good stuff. So now you sell a magazine from your website, as well as kits?

Ann: Yes, after the initial five or six kits that I did myself, I realised, "I don't want to just teach what I do because everybody does coloured pencil a little differently depending on the surface and their subject matter and their personality." Then I started hiring other people to create kits for us. Now we have other people writing kits for annkullberg.com

George: How do you decide what kits to create?

Ann: I probably could work that out better. I see something I think is really pretty or really interesting that we don't have a kit on. I contact that artist and say, "Wow, this is really nice stuff. Want to make a kit for us?" That's it. It's all need based. I'm also really connected within the coloured pencil world because I'm teaching all the time. I hear what people want and I can see what sells. It's mostly just me seeing something and saying, "Wow, this would be nice".

George: Tell us a little bit about your teaching then. Does that work into the website or is it a completely different sideline?

Ann: Well, it does work into the website now because of the webinars. Until last year I taught three to five day workshops around the country. I've taught forty-four states now. Also Japan and Mexico and Canada and the UK. But I'm getting older and travel is getting a little bit less fun. We started the webinars on my own personal technique in February and that has been a really great product for us.

George: That's brilliant. You've taken your creative skill and found several different avenues to monetise it: a magazine, kits, workshops, webinars. Now, you've even built a team around it. That's brilliant going.

Ann: Well, I think that artists do have a little bit of trouble monetising their skills. We are not known for liking our numbers! I think at some point, a few years into the website, I realised that I was finding opportunities to make money all of the time. If I could only have had six of me, I'd be doing a lot better! It seemed like a switch turned on. Instead of just thinking of it as art and people liking it, I started thinking about sharing my talent, my techniques and other people's techniques, teaching – and that there's all kinds of ways to make money with art. You just have to have that switch turned on.

George: I think there's a perception that you have to be ridiculously intelligent like Warren Buffet or Richard Branson to be a business person, but really all you need to be is half sensible. If you can start spotting the patterns of what people ask for then you'll find business opportunities.

Ann: I see them absolutely everywhere now! If you can figure out a way to give people what they want, I think that's the key: knowing something, having an idea that people want, and then it's so much fun to find ways to get it to them.

"It seemed like a switch turned on. Instead of just thinking of it as art and people liking it, I started thinking about sharing my talent, my techniques."

George: So how do you market your products?

Ann: Well, that's a hard one. I've been online for so darn long, fifteen years, that there are all these back links. I've written three books and I've just published two more books that are compilation books of coloured pencil work from around the world. I'm on Amazon. I'm on North Light, which is a big publisher here in the US for art. I've just been online for so long that coloured pencil instruction and Ann Kullberg are synonymous.

George: That's great. That's where you won.

Ann: Yeah. It is. I also think the main ingredient for success is hanging in there; just not quitting.

George: Even when things are changing so fast. Are you on social media?

Ann: Yes. I can't do my own Facebook anymore but I have somebody publishing three posts a week. I've got a Twitter account. I don't know if we have Instagram or not. I'm not terrific at that because what I really love is creating new products and just figuring out what's the next big thing. Of course I use MailChimp. I've got about eight thousand people on the list. We send out emails twice a month and let people know what's new or what they can save money on.

George: Cool. What's next then?

Ann: I'm going to continue with the webinar series. We've done two and I've got a third one coming up. Having a business as tiny as mine, I can wake up in the morning and decide we're going to have a free shipping Friday and in an hour we've got a free shipping Friday. All my new stuff just happens. I can be on a plane and think, "You know what we should do," and a couple of weeks later we do it. I'm not much of a ... this is going to sound terrible, I'm not much of a goal setter. I'm more of a ride the wind.

George: I think you've got so many advantages by being small. You can, as you say, just wake up and decide to do something on your site and it's there in an hour. At SendOwl we perform several experiments in terms of features. We just didn't know if subscriptions was going to fly, for example, so we put it out for a month and ended up with one hundred and fifty subscriptions. I said to myself, "Okay, there was quite a lot of demand for that.

Ann: That's really right. I love that. I try something, it doesn't work, oh well, it just goes away.

George: Brilliant. Ann, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. If people wanted to find out more about you and coloured pencil art where would they find you online?

Ann: They would find me at annkullberg.com.