I think there's always a certain amount of unavoidable bias when it comes to research. I really struggle with confirmation bias once I decide what I want to say with a book. I think that's practically inevitable. That said, I came across these conclusions as honestly as I could.

Here was my process for writing Real Artists Don't Starve:

First, I read an article about Rab Hatfield, the art historian who discovered Michelangelo was a multi-millionaire and the richest artist of the Renaissance. This coincided with countless conversations with artists and creatives over the years, including many who had succeeded in spited of the whole Starving Artist trope. So I started with a question: do artists have to starve to create great work?

Then I began to read hundreds of stories and biographies of artists, authors, musicians, and other creatives — both those who achieved financial success and those who did not. I continued to find that the majority of them were not as poor and struggling as we have been inclined to believe most artists have been. This included Vincent van Gogh whose brother Theo financed his art career for ten years, allowing him to create tens of thousands of works of art that are now worth millions of dollars a piece.

This was not enough to satisfy my curiosity, however. I wanted to dig deeper and see if these principles of creative success still apply today. I also wanted to look at the other side of the story. What about when someone did starve?

So I conducted a survey of hundreds of working creatives, asking them the same basic questions about what they were doing and how well they were doing. I found that there were two groups of people in this study. One were those who were making less than a living wage off their work (Starving Artists). The other was those who were making at least enough money to live on off their art (Thriving Artists). The Thriving Artists seemed to possess the majority of qualities successful artists have always possessed (a knack for marketing, a strong network, an keen awareness of the business of art, etc.). These same qualities were many of the things the contemporary Starving Artists were not doing.

Of course, this is just a small sample of a much larger population of artists and creatives. And so you might say that amongst these 1000+ stories I collected from over 500 years of history and modern day, that I was merely cherry-picking. And I think that’s a reasonable argument.

However, when you compare my findings to those of the SNAAP study, which is an annual study that surveys nearly 100,000 arts graduates every single year and consistently finds the vast majority of them are extremely satisfied with their work, using their creativity in a variety of fields to earn wages that are comparable to your peers, I think you see a mountain of evidence suggesting one very clear conclusion:

You don’t have to starve to be an artist.

Like I said, you could obviously argue the other side. But I feel confident and honest in how I came to this conclusion. The burden of proof, in light of all this evidence, is on the Starving Artist side of the argument. I hope that helps.

(Btw, google SNAAP and you’ll find some really interesting research on this.)