To support yourself by your creative work is to occupy a position the market did not design for you and must constantly be renegotiated with. The business of being an artist — pricing, promotion, the management of time and energy across the making and the selling — is not a separate concern from the art but an environment that the art must survive. Those who make this work tend to be clear-eyed about what the market can and cannot offer them, and they do not ask it to provide what only the work itself can give.
Each step builds on the last.