Everyone wants to work their dream job.

For some, that means Beer Taster. For others, Implant Inspector. More often, in the painting community, you hear people all the time talking about how they'd looooove to be able to paint minis for a living. Whether it's in regards to a Staff Painter position for a company or selling minis online the gist is always the same, "It must be so nice to be able to do something you love for a living!"

There are quite a few painters out there able to do such a thing. Mind you, there are very, very few Staff Painter positions out there in the mini industry, and even fewer that pay by the hour instead of by the figure. The majority of the "professional" miniature painters are eBayers. Every week or every month they throw little tiny pieces of metal with countless hours sunk into them up on the web in the hopes someone with less spare time and much more money wants them. Nine times out of ten the answer is yes; if you look at what's sold on eBay you'll see that there's a market for painted minis of every caliber.

This Manifesto is part personal mission statement and part guideline to anyone else wanting to sell minis to make their bread and beer money. It's still both handy and dandy for someone wanting to sell here and there to make a bit of fun money, but this guide's for the misguided visionary individual wanting to pay their bills with miniature sales. Every month or two someone pops up on a forum and, instead of searching for the mountains of info that has gone before, they ask the same questions countless people have before them.

"How do I make money selling miniatures on eBay?"

"Why am I only getting $[x]? I think my minis are really worth $[y]."

"Why is All-Terrain Monkey so good looking? Is it really fair to everyone else?"

Now, there is no shortage of people willing to help out with those kinds of questions, and there is definitely no one right way to go about making money with minis (but a lot of wrong ones). However, I've always been a proponent of working smarter, not harder (even before my rich, overbearing Uncle Sam taught me some things). I have the enviable position of being friends with an inordinately large sampling of miniature painters on the upper end of the spectrum; the kinds of painters who make several hundred dollars per miniature sold, consistently, and who have been selling for many years. Heck, in some cases, these are the people who helped carve the niche for painted miniature sales online.

My most prolific mentor (in terms of words, if nothing else) is of course Anne Foerster of Reaper Miniatures fame, one of the rare hourly Staff Painters and famed seller from her days as Vaitalla. Most of what I'm regurgitating is her eBay Bible she's espoused from soapboxes at cons and forums all across the world, sprinkled in with my own observations (I'm a n00b too but I do get results) and a heavy dash of info I've gleaned from talking to people like Jen Haley, Robert Cruse, Liliana Troy, and countless others who will be mad I didn't name them. Those of you who've seen me chumming with several other painters may wonder why they're not mentioned; while I've learned how to paint from so many insanely talented people not all of them are true-blue dyed-in-the-wool eBayers. I'm also old and forgetful, which might explain an omission.

So, enough with the intro, on with the meat n' taters!