Passive Income Ideas for Artists and Stationery Designers

Want to make more money as an artist? Have you been hearing about “passive income” but aren’t sure how to get started? This article is for you! I have more than 10 regular income streams in my business, and make over $100,000 each year through “passive” income streams. So let’s talk about some of the best passive revenue streams for artists and stationery designers. 

If you want to get started with these revenue streams, I’d recommend joining our membership, Stationery School, where you’ll get immediate access to over 60 lessons – including lessons on all of these revenue streams! 

What is Passive Income?

I put “passive” in quotes in the first paragraph for a reason. I actually hate this term of passive income, because it makes it sound like you can just press release on a new product and rake in millions of sales. That’s just…not how any of this works.

I like to think of passive income more as pre-loaded income, because most of the time, you’re doing the work up front. The passive part comes in when you make the sale. For active income, you have to fulfill the order (mail the sticker, make the invitations, create the custom digital file, etc.). But for passive income, when a sale comes in, you don’t have to “do” anything. You have already done the work, and it fulfills automatically. 

A great example of this is selling fonts. When someone purchases my fonts, I simply see the sale come in, but the site they purchase from will deliver the files automatically. I already created the font, so I don’t have to do anything further.

There are a few ways in which this work isn’t totally passive – first of course, is that I had to make the font in the first place. My first one took over 6 months of active work. Secondly, you often have to market your passive products, at least at first. We’ll talk about some ways to make this easier. And thirdly, you still have to manage customer service usually. If someone has an issue with the font, or gets a new computer and loses their download – I typically have to handle that. 

So no, passive income is not entirely passive. But it does untie your income from your time in a big way. And if you’re able to make something popular – you can make a lot of profit! One of my favorite things about passive income is that it’s completely scalable. If I sell 100,000 copies of my font, I haven’t done much more work than if I sell 1 copy. But I sure make a heckuva lot more money.

So let’s chat about some good passive income ideas for artists.

Fonts

Fonts are a great option for graphic designers, calligraphers, and letterers of all sorts! It’s a lot easier to make print fonts than script ones, and you will have to invest in a font-making software. I learned how to make script fonts from this Font-Making Course – she recommends Glyphs if you use a Mac and FontCreator if you use a PC. 

I personally love making fonts, however it’s one of the options on this list that requires a pretty decent learning curve. So I’d recommend keeping it simple at first and figuring out if you like font-making before diving too far in. I’ve found that the more fonts you offer, the better your sales will be with all of them.

Popular spots to sell fonts include Creative Market (takes about 50%), Etsy (takes about 20%), and MyFonts (takes about 50%). Things that will help you sell more fonts are researching trends, creating good cover and sample imagery, and adding advanced features to your fonts (like ligatures, alternates, Roman Numerals, etc.). 

Digital Downloads

If you already have a backlog of artwork, this one might be a simple option for you to get started! Selling digital downloads can include individual or grouped art elements, backgrounds, textures, drawings, paintings, etc. You’ll often see these for sale on Creative Market, Etsy, and Creative Fabrica. If you create vector art, you can sell on additional marketplaces like VectorStock. 

A big key here is setting up your artwork sets such that they are easy for your ideal audience to use. When I’m looking to purchase artwork for wedding invitations, for instance, I like sets that include a good variety of options, a few pre-made frames and arrangements, and the individual elements so I can make my own arrangements. I often won’t buy a set that only has 1-2 pieces in it unless it’s something very specific.

One of my favorite artists, Create the Cut, teaches us how she sells on Etsy and Creative Market within our Stationery School membership! Check out her shop for some killer examples. 

If you have more niche artwork (like wedding venues, for instance) you might want to market this to a more specific market, like other wedding stationers, vs. listing these on a larger marketplace. There are a lot of options for licensing your digital download art! But especially if you already have some things created – it might be nice to make more money on work you’ve already done in the past. How’s that for passive?

Courses

Of course (no pun intended) education can be a really wonderful passive income stream, if it’s something you’re interested in. Not everyone enjoys teaching (and not everyone is good at it!). There are a lot of options for dipping your toe into education to see if it’s for you, including:

• One-time webinars
• Joining an artist summit
• Teaching under someone else’s platform (I hire artists to teach in my membership all the time!)
• Teaching on a platform like Skillshare
• Guest hosting podcasts

When teaching courses, it’s a great idea to get some audience feedback prior to creating the entire course. You can ask how valuable they think a course like this would be, what questions they have about your topic, what their biggest struggles are, and if they’ve ever taken courses like this (to do some competitive research). You can also do a pre-sale to raise a little money and some awareness for your course while you’re still creating it. 

Also, with courses, you should consider the long-term plan for your course. Are you going to open it and “launch” multiple times a year? Keep it open all the time? Add to it over time to keep excitement going? Raise the price as it gets better? Lots of options here to keep things feeling fresh and new with your course content! Another great option over time is to start running ads to your course(s). 

Digital Tools

Even if you don’t want to teach directly, you can help other artists with valuable digital tools! This can take the shape of a lot of things – spreadsheets, guides, calculators, etc. I have a Printable Color Palette and an Adobe Creative Cloud Library that are both super useful for other invitation designers, and make me a good amount of passive revenue.

The best place to look for these tools is in your current business. What do you use that you’ve created? Is there something you wish someone would create, that you could just take the initiative on? I wished for both of the tools I mentioned above for a long time – but didn’t want to put in the work to create them myself. Eventually, I realized that if I put in the work and time, I could sell them to other designers, who would definitely pay so that they didn’t have to put in the work to make them. Turns out, it’s been a win-win for all of us! 

Affiliate Income

What is affiliate income? This is when you tell someone about a product you love, and the company that makes that product pays you a percentage or flat fee when that person buys their product. You’re basically getting a referral fee for everyone you refer to their business! 

Not sure which partnerships you should start with? Ask yourself these questions

1. What do I use every day in my business that I just love?
2. What do people already ask me about all the time?
3. What products can I share my love for without having to exaggerate at all? 

The best currency you have when it comes to affiliate marketing is your authenticity! So anything that you can truly share with enthusiasm will be a good partnership for you.

Licensing

Licensing can take on many forms – including selling digital downloads like we talked about earlier. But another option would be licensing your artwork to brands directly. The way this works is you license them your artwork, and they use your artwork on their products. Usually you get paid in some combination of up front art fees and royalties over time. 

If you want to get started in licensing, definitely start with a solid portfolio showing your designs and how they could be used on certain products. Brands will like to see “collections” as opposed to one-off designs. You can start pitching your work to companies that you want to work with! Maybe start with smaller companies than Target, right now. But hey, you never know!

Print on Demand

Print on Demand is sort of a form of licensing at its core. Basically, you’ll create a design, and select some products that it can be printed on. Instead of you printing it on that product and managing the inventory and shipping, however, you let another company handle that for you. Think Zazzle or Society6, if you’ve ever ordered from there.

My favorite companies to use for Print on Demand apparel are Printful and Printify. Something I love about Print on Demand is that you can get designs up and selling really quickly. There’s no ordering lead time or minimum quantity you have to find funds for, so your ideas are really easy to take action on. 

Print on Demand Licensing Rights

A big thing to pay attention to with print on demand is licensing rights – most digital elements you would purchase are not licensed for print on demand usage. You’d want to either create your own design elements, or use elements specifically licensed for this – Creative Fabrica has a ton of great options! 

Overall, there are so many ways you can use your artistic talents to create passive revenue streams! I wouldn’t start by diving into all of them, but think about one or two that are really exciting to you. It’ll take some time to get going, so don’t expect to just press Go and make tons of sales without a solid launch and marketing plan.

Some ways that you can sell more passive income are:

• Keeping up with trends
• Updating your products regularly
• Repackaging your products in new ways (holidays, bundles, etc.)
• Running sales sometimes
• Using SEO to drive sales based on organic search (don’t worry – there’s a full lesson on this in Stationery School too!)

We have longer lessons diving into lots of these topics in Stationery School – along with so many more topics you’ll love, and more coming every month! If you want to see what all is included, here’s a list of all of the current lesson topics!