LOOKING SUCCESSFUL IS EXPENSIVE
Some creative spending pays for the work. Some pays for looking like someone whose career is already working. Priced in days of runway, the two become easier to tell apart.
Some costs never appear on an invoice. The new headshots. The showreel re-cut. The website moved to a better template. The trip to the festival where the right people will be. The round after the screening, bought because buying it is what someone doing well would do.
The logic behind them is real. Work tends to go to people who look as though they already get work, so artists spend to look established. The money comes out of the same account that pays for the time to make anything. The strangeness is that the more convincing the appearance, the shorter the runway standing behind it.
Appearance also has a way of becoming permanent. Once the studio address, the better camera and the photographer everyone uses are in place, dropping them can feel like admitting something, so they stay, month after month, in what goes out.
Pricing appearance in days
Pounds hide this. Days do not. Here is an example: an artist spending £1,000 a month more than comes in. At that rate, each day of runway costs about £33. With example prices, the costs above look like this:
- Headshots at £280: about 8.5 days
- A festival trip at £600: about 18 days
- A showreel edit at £1,200: about 36 days
- A £90 round of drinks: nearly 3 days
None of these is wrong, and some of them will be the best money spent all year. The days only make the trade visible. The reel edit is a month of runway, and that is worth knowing before the editor is booked rather than after.
A Runway To does this arithmetic without comment. Add the headshots as a one-off cost and the runway moves by the days they cost, on the day they are paid. Whether they were worth it is a question it leaves with the artist, where it belongs.
Who is it for?
A better test than “can I afford it” is “who is it aimed at”. For each cost that is mainly about being seen, name the person it is meant to reach: a casting director, a commissioning editor, a gallerist, a booker, a client. If it reaches someone who can hire you, it is part of the work, and the days are a price like any other. If it is aimed at peers, or a feed, or the feeling of being further along, it is a costume. Costumes can still be worth wearing, as long as they are bought on purpose.
The test has edges. For a photographer, the portfolio is the work, and appearance and practice are the same spend. A festival can be a costume and the place where the next job comes from. Some spending is a bet on a person you have not met yet. Those bets are allowed; they just deserve a number.
Go back through the last three months of what went out. Mark each cost that was mainly about being seen, write its price in days beside it, and beside that, the name of the person it was for. Where there is no name, decide before spending those days again.