Copyblogger’s Brian Clark recently wrote a series of articles regarding the 1000 Paintings project. In said project, the “artist” is selling a limited edition of 1000 hand-painted mounted canvases of the numbers 1 to 1000. The more important of Brian’s articles is Why One Thousand Paintings Works.

But while I’ve not disagreed with Brian to date, I don’t completely agree with the reasons he thinks these so-called paintings work. Either he’s being entirely too graceful, or he’s actually missed one main reason why they work. Or I got frustrated with the whole nonsense and skimmed over Brian’s articles instead of reading them thoroughly. And since I’m a more blunt person than he, I’m going to throw in my 2c. (And so you don’t get the wrong impression, I think Brian is a genius and a phenomenal writer. I may have missed something important.)

As he rightly says, it’s not the actual paintings themselves “that mean anything.” Sure they’re unique, but so is the furniture that a New York City artist made with his friends’ poo, frozen for texture. I’m not making that up. And they’re limited editions. So were Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup paintings, which still generate great debate to this day. And there’s the Canadian artist who painted three stripes of colour across a giant canvas and received millions for it. From the Canadian government, no less. But this latter example doesn’t actually fit in with the others.

Why not? Because what I get of the whole thing is that you only really have to find 1,000 interested people to make an online project successful. That’s if you are single entrepeneur as opposed to a company. There’s an old saying that if you want to be a millionaire, you can sell $1 items to a million people or a million dollar item to one person. You could also sell $1,000 items to 1,000 people.

But if you are just one person, say a blogger/ online writer, your overhead is not nearly as much as for a print publishing company. Think you could get by with $27,000/yr? That means selling $27 items to 1,000 people. Every year.

$27,000 doesn’t sound like a lot. But if you’re not commuting to work, you’re actually saving a great deal of money. And in the United States and Canada at least, you should be able to write off some or all of the expenses related to your online writing career.

Consider the alternate - or at least my alternate. On the very last computer contract I did before becoming a full-time starving writer, I calculated that including car payments, gasoline, toll road costs, and unavoidably expensive lunches, plus the necessity of working Saturdays, I actually spent close to $1200 every month getting to work.

That doesn’t include the outrageous amount of time I sat in traffic jams in the Greater Toronto Area. Some days, I spent an extra 2-3 hours just sitting and doing nothing except wishing I could work from home. That’s time I could have spent doing something more productive, may be a side business from home. But even just 5 years ago, I couldn’t have imagined that an entrepreneur could make money on the Internet. Now I’m sure they can, if they approach is right.

Granted, I sometimes miss the whole working in an office thing, simply for social reasons, I don’t miss the traffic, the road rage, the fumes, the insane toll charges, and the politics. But after my sober reflection about my one-year blogiversary, I thought about some of the potential ways to actually earn a dollar writing online. I’ll reflect on them in the next post.