← The Good Ship Illustration
The Good Ship Illustration
“I’m not sure how to price my illustration work. I think I panic and undercharge because I’m worried they’ll change their mind if it’s too much.”
00:19:33
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- [00:25]
Katie
Okay, we've got a good question from Annabelle King, which is I think a lot of people will relate to. I'm not sure how to price my work. I think I panic and undercharge because I'm worried they'll change their mind if it's too much.
- [00:37]
Helen
This opens such a big conversation, doesn't it? Because people undervalue things. If you undervalue them, you know, freebies, favors, those will be the worst jobs you'll ever do. Yeah, yeah. Favors for friends or family will be nightmare jobs. But changing how you value things and externalizing that just gets you a whole different area of respect for your work. But it is difficult. We know that.
- [01:04]
Annabelle
I like Katie's. Katie's thing of. It's all made up. It's all made up.
- [01:10]
Katie
It's all completely made up. But you do totally have to value your own work first. Because if you think you're having a laugh, there's no way your work's worth a thousand pounds. People can feel it when you say it. I think there's. People don't really. I think it's quite a sort of like an environment. Talking about money, people get very like facts and it's all very concrete, but really there's so much energy stuff around it as well that like the woo woo side of it.
- [01:34]
Helen
But there's also that aspect. You look at the, you know, paintings at auction or how funds are valued. They claim it's science. A lot of it is. Is marketing the value of something. And we are marketing ourselves. There's no escaping that. And there isn't a set value. Your worth is what your work is worth, depending on your profile, how long you've been an illustrator, where it ends up, you could argue those things they do help a bit, but ultimately it is. It's a complete variable, isn't it? You could be an illustrator that's been around for one year. You've done some great marketing, you've got a lot of followers. That's. Your value's gone right up and you've only got a year's experience.
- [02:14]
Katie
Yeah, I know. For Helen in the publishing, it's quite set, isn't it?
- [02:17]
Annabelle
They quite set you good to them with your idea. They might like it. They'll take it to an acquisitions meeting. They'll work out how many they think they can sell on your past sales record or if you're a complete newbie, how exciting they think your work is, how it'll be received, how many they think they can get in the bookshops, how Many they can sell in co editions to other countries and they put all of these calculations in a big bingo callers thingy, Bobby, and spin it round and they come out with a number and they make you an offer. Then you can go back and say, actually, if you paid me that, it would take me six months to make the book. I probably can't pay my bills, I need to charge you this. And so they do. You can go back and ask for more money. In fact, do that always, because there's probably always a bit more in the pot. But I don't feel like as a picture book person, you could just name your price. You couldn't just pluck a price out of the air and say, this is what I charge. Because they really relate it to how many they think they can sell.
- [03:20]
Helen
And the same as editorial, you can't go to a magazine, they won't ask you. I mean, they might ask you your fee, but mostly they'll say, this quarter page is always 350 pounds. Or they have a set budget to produce the magazine based on the advertisers, what they gain from the advertising within the magazine. But then there's the whole other areas, like an advertising campaign with an agency. It's often in the media that you're in, isn't it, Katie, where you can start to negotiate much bigger, bigger figures.
- [03:50]
Katie
Yeah. Marketing people talk about like what the market can stand. I think that's quite. Because that you can think about that logically for each niche bit of the illustration industry. So I think when you're freelancing for me anyway, when I started out, I charged a set amount per hour. Everybody said yes immediately. And now in hindsight, I'm like, I was too cheap, obviously. So, like people saw my work, who I'd worked with before, they liked what I was doing, how I was talking about my work and communicating the value. And they're like, amazing. Yes, sign her up. Like Bookerin. But then it got to a point, I was so busy all the time that I upped my rates. And then some people started saying no. But then it got to a point because I worked with more big clients, it built up again and then I was fully booked again. Raised my rates to almost. It was almost like raising my rates to control the flow of work, which was a nice thing to do. And then it got to like. It just kept doing that dance like, I'm too busy, I'm going to charge more, I'm too busy, I'm going to charge more, I'm too busy. I'm going to charge more and then getting to a point where I'm like, I don't really want to charge anymore. And enough people are saying no now that it feels like in a good place.
- [04:54]
Helen
It's really feeling your way, isn't it? I mean, it's a relatively new field of illustration, so it's slightly wild west in terms of pricing because like you said, there's still lots of live illustrators that you've discovered been charging way too low for a day's work because they didn't know.
- [05:12]
Katie
They didn't know. And they're thinking of like old day rates of like it's 200, 150 pounds for the day in London. Like that's old now. And it's not applicable for live illustration at all because it's completely different. And they're going to be using. You've almost got to have your licensing head on. Like they're going to be using the illustration a lot afterwards. So they're not paying you for your time. They're paying for the value of having this incredible thing to communicate all the boring. They've been saying, like, it's worth much more than 200.
- [05:38]
Helen
It's a performance piece in a way, isn't it? You're standing there performing intensely in front of a load of people for huge multinational companies that really need this information to go in their customers or in their employees head and you're the only person who can do it. So really the ceiling on that price is. Could be anything, depending on the value to them. So I mean, it depends where it is in the world of illustration, what you can do. If it's, if it's publishing, if it's editorial, the brakes are on. And actually those prices haven't changed in a long while, have they?
- [06:12]
Annabelle
I was talking to an illustrator, got in touch with me because she'd been made an offer by an agent. Have I just talked about this on the podcast recently? Maybe I'll keep it quick. She'd been made an offer by an agent, but the agent took, oh, I think it was 30% or it might have been 35. And the publisher were making her an offer for a book. And it wasn't a lot, it was something like £7,000 and the agent was going to take 35%. And I said to her, how long is it going to take you to make that book? She was asking whether she should go with the agent or not. And I said, you got to work out even if you got the. All of that money. For that book. Can you really make that book? Say it takes you four or five months. Can you live on that amount of money? Now take 35% off and give it to the agent. Now take 20% off for your tax. What are you left with? You really can't make that work. Which is. It is really difficult. It's really difficult. This is why I have a literary agent. Because they. Literary agents, their percentage is way less. Yeah, or you could do it without an agent. There's no need to have an agent.
- [07:18]
Helen
There's so many. It's very contrarian. Within pricing, there are no hard and fast rules. And then suddenly there are, as in publishing, an editorial. And we always say, oh, you shouldn't base your illustration based on time. But then there are other areas that do base it on time. And as an illustrator, as Helen's just kind of illustrated, to use that word again, you do have to know how long something's going to take you in relation to what you're being paid. But that is your secret rate. And you need to know what your bottom line is and what you could and couldn't live on for years. I didn't do that. I just hit and hoped and thought, I'll just keep illustrating. Oh, yes, okay to that. Okay to that. And I never looked at the figures until the end of the year and used to think, God, I thought I'd earned more than that. And it was only later on, when I really started to sort my pricing out and take it seriously and get more conf, that my annual income looked as closer to what I thought it should have been. Because, you know, illustrators work all hours. You have dinner, you go back and finish it off because there's a deadline. And sometimes some weeks you've worked all day and all evening, and it is a tough and demanding life. And you wonder why the figures don't kind of correlate with that. It means put your prices up.
- [08:32]
Annabelle
As a picture bookmaker, you do have some more control in it because you can decide which deals you're going to turn down and which you're not. So this illustrator I was talking to, I won't say who it is, but you both know who she is, and we all think her work is incredible. She's very, very talented and she's a newbie, and she's a very exciting newbie. And so I thought the offer from the publisher and the agent were both bad. I don't think she knew how great her work is and that she could demand a lot more respect than that. And so, yeah, we had these messages back and forth where I was saying, I think he could find a literary agent, I think you could find a publisher who'll pay you more. But sometimes you don't know that. You think, well, what's everybody else being paid? And I need to get a foot in the door, I'll just take this. But it's not viable.
- [09:17]
Helen
I think the AOI can help with this as well. If you're a member of the aoi, they have a pricing calculator which is really good for some of the kind of main genres of the business. Once you're out in the field of talking to a private client, maybe someone in your town who's approached you for their coffee shop, or. Or a multinational that's approached you to do an illustration for their catalogue, then it's very variable and the prices can be wildly different. But the AOI pricing calculator is really solid for that. And it's worth doing it just to find out how you match up to a going rate. And they do show you a kind of national rate and they divide the job into three different sectors from doing it for a big company, multinational, a national company, or a mum and pop shop in your town. So there's all these different nuances that go into it, but you do need to know what your own bottom line is. And I. I like that. Jessica. He's brilliant. The dark art of pricing. Look it up if you haven't. She comes at it from a graphic designer's point of view and a letterer, but she also talks about the value of the work that you're giving to the client, and that comes out in terms of the license that you give them. Because you don't just make something, it gets used once and that's that. Perhaps they use it for 15 years and it becomes integral to their business. We talk lot about this on the. On the Business Illustrators business course, about how you can generate more cash from a piece of work that you've done by licensing it properly. Because a job can be worked out into two fees, your artworking fee and then your licensing fee, which can be a lot more than the original artworking fee. So it's a huge thing, isn't it? Pricing? Oh, God, it's making my head spin, just the thought of it.
- [11:03]
Katie
One of the best things my big sister did was when I was like, I want to be an illustrator. She. She made me sit down and she was like, how many weeks of the year do you want to work? How many hours A day. Do you want to work? What are your bills? Blah, blah, blah. So I had like the. The egg number. That was like what I needed to earn to pay my rent, whatever, blah, blah, blah. All my, like, everything. And then how much time I wanted to work. And I think it is ages ago now. It worked out at like £35 an hour. But then I realized I can't work six hours a day. I don't have that much energy. Like, I can actually only work really three hours a day. I've got like three good hours.
- [11:41]
Helen
Bearing in mind this is live scribing that you're talking about as well.
- [11:43]
Katie
This was before I even discovered live illustration. This was just any illustration.
- [11:47]
Annabelle
I think it's very hard for any illustrator to sit down and work seven, eight hours. I think the quality of the work, it would. I couldn't sit down for that length of time and make good quality of work over that length of time.
- [12:01]
Helen
But a lot of the work is also researching some of its thinking.
- [12:04]
Annabelle
Yeah.
- [12:04]
Helen
You know, like agency people, like ad agency guys, they're literally being paid to sit in a chair with their feet up on the table thinking up crazy ideas. That's why they have long lunches and go berserk because they're trying to trigger ideas and none of that's really quantifiable. 90 of what they do is just inspiration seeking. And illustrators need to do a lot of that too.
- [12:23]
Katie
Exactly. I think you're much better to underestimate how many hours you're going to work.
- [12:26]
Helen
Yeah.
- [12:27]
Katie
And then you've got loads of. I think you. Helen said wide margins. You need wide margins. You've got lots of room to play. And then when you're working out that number, like what you need to earn, how many hours you want to work. That's maths. You know, you can divide it and stuff. I'm sure there'll be online calculators and things.
- [12:43]
Helen
There are a few different ones. The one that's the book that I really liked is the Freelancer's Bible by Something Grade. You know that Michael Grade used to be head of the BBC.
- [12:51]
Katie
I think it's.
- [12:52]
Helen
His daughter might have got this wrong, but she really drills down on your big sister's questions and she says stuff like, well, you know, if you're in a. If you're in a job, you maybe you'd have holidays, you'd have development time. Think often you might be ill. And then, oh, yeah, pensions, all of that. And she really helps refine your bottom line, annual income as a Freelancer and things to bear in mind and. And the wobble of how many hours, how many hours a day do you need? How many days a week do you want a Friday off? I mean, illustrators need to go and hang out in galleries, don't they, and read picture books and all sorts of things. You've got to build that into it. So the Freelancer's Bible is a good, easy to read and to fill in book about how to figure out what you need to earn. And then you start thinking about your prices because they're based on a kind of actuality rather than a sense of self worth, which is a disaster if you.
- [13:46]
Katie
Especially when you're starting out. But then I was going to say, but this is tricky because I feel like Illustrator's default mode is self doubt and like my work's not good enough. But then also I see the flip side where people's work maybe isn't that great and they're like, I want to charge more. And I think there is a annoying chicken and egg thing, isn't there? Like, how can you become the illustrator who can charge more? Like, what in your work needs to change, what on your website needs to change? Maybe that's.
- [14:13]
Annabelle
Well, maybe you need. You have to discover that in the way that you did Katie. So you became fully booked at that race and so you knew that you were good enough, you were being in demand enough that you could put your prices up and then your work progressed and then you're in demand even more until you could put your prices up. So you sort of follow how much demand there is for your work.
- [14:31]
Katie
Yeah, I think you grow into the illustrator that can charge £3,000 a day or whatever because you just wiggle your way in there. But I don't know if you can just be like, that's the rate now, if you haven't put in the work and built your portfolio and built your credibility and all that stuff.
- [14:46]
Helen
I mean, this is basic business, isn't it? And it's. I hate saying it, but when. Well, we weren't taught it on our course and I. My illustration was an ma, and at that point I don't think there was, you know, on an ma. It's not set up to talk about business necessarily, it's more about your, your creative work. But I think even when you were at college there was not much. There wasn't much business talk, was there, Helen?
- [15:09]
Annabelle
No, not really. I can't remember any. Actually. I learned most business stuff from my dad who sold cars.
- [15:15]
Helen
Yeah, Legend, this is why the good ship's here is because of Helen's dad. But it takes so long and there are entire courses about business, just business about business. So the fact that we had to learn illustration and no one told us how to make money from it, no wonder people are confused. And thank God for any advisory body that helps illustrators figure out how to price things, because it is difficult and it's. It's not terribly straightforward and you need to grow your. It's a lot about your confidence, isn't it? Confidence is a huge part. And fake it till you make it. Add on Katie's 20% increase as well.
- [15:54]
Annabelle
Yeah.
- [15:54]
Katie
I think Helen was the original thing, because you always. With negotiations, I remember you saying early on, like, there's always 20% wiggle room. Yeah.
- [16:02]
Annabelle
Always go back and ask for some more. Because the worst is they'll say no.
- [16:05]
Katie
Yeah.
- [16:06]
Annabelle
But they usually don't. There's usually. Usually they've made you an offer because they had an idea in mind and they thought you might come back and ask for some more.
- [16:12]
Katie
Yeah.
- [16:13]
Helen
So definitely you'd be mad not to ask for that. But also you said, yeah, but put Your prices up 20%, which is, you know, the tax rate. See how it goes.
- [16:22]
Katie
Yeah, because when I went back registered in the uk, you have to. You get to a certain level, you have to charge vat, it's stupid and annoying. And then you have to charge people 20% more. So when I did that, I was like, sweating Lila wig, like, oh, nobody's gonna want to work with me 20% more. And I did it and nobody even noticed. So I think, like, everybody, you can just charge 20% more. If you're going to start anywhere, just do that.
- [16:42]
Helen
Yeah. I think don't base your sense of value on what you would pay, because what people are paying us, their sense of what's expensive and what's not is completely different from ours. And even when you do something to your house and a tradesman comes in, they give you the bill and you're like, oh, my God, we should at least be charging that. You know, if you've got 20 years published experience behind you and you're bulking at a daily rate for a plumber or a joiner, it's time to start doing something about your pricing.
- [17:12]
Katie
What was it my mum said? I can't believe the NHS is wasting money on live illustration. Wow, thanks, Mom. But it just goes to show, like, just because you might have ideas about the NHS and how they should spend their money, you know, they see the Value in communicating visually. It's value of business. What's in there? What's in the pocket?
- [17:32]
Annabelle
Your mum's support of your career.
- [17:33]
Katie
Then I will discuss claim. My mum's very supportive. She won't be listening to this. But just like, it took me by surprise, but I was like, yeah, you're right. Like, why would anybody pay for anything ever?
- [17:45]
Helen
That is interesting that when you. You're working away as an illustrator, undercharging, watching every penny, then you price yourself based on your perception of what life is costing you. It's a recipe for disaster, isn't it? When really, you know, especially private clients out there have way more money than you could imagine.
- [18:03]
Katie
Yeah, there's a lot out there.
- [18:05]
Helen
Yeah. At least when you're in traditional illustration, there's some guidance. You know what the magazines are paying and, you know, perhaps you could push for a little bit more. You know, what the books, the publishers are paying. But once you're working in a different field and they ask you what your budget is.
- [18:23]
Katie
I think that's why people love having an agent or the idea of having an agent. It's like mummy to look after you.
- [18:30]
Helen
And even a couple of years experience with an agent giving you insight on what some of these fees are. I'd love to get an agent on the business course. We've been trying to do that for a while. If there's any agents out there. Illustration.
- [18:43]
Annabelle
A general illustration agent.
- [18:44]
Helen
Yeah. Who would like to come and talk about pricing and fees? We'd love it.
- [18:49]
Katie
Get in touch.
- [18:50]
Helen
Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I think we might have talked about pricing as much as we can without confusing people.
- [19:00]
Annabelle
Put your prices up.
- [19:01]
Katie
Yeah, put your prices up.
- [19:03]
Annabelle
Bye.
- [19:03]
Katie
Bye.
- [19:03]
Helen
Bye. It.