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hey guys welcome back to my channel we are going to talk about pricing today and I'm excited to talk about pricing because like it is something it's one of those topics that is really complex and can be a little bit confusing especially for people who are coming up in the industry and who are maybe new are emerging or have who haven't done a lot of client work and honestly it can be confusing even for people who are more established like me and yeah to that end I think it's one of those topics that can just use a lot more conversation and I'm aiming and hoping to make more videos about pricing in the future so before I dive in I'm going to give the same disclaimer that I have given in the last few weeks videos and that is that I have an air conditioner running behind me so I hope the sound is OK but if you are new to this channel and this is the first video you have mind that you're ever watching that is what that weird buzzing sound in the background is and yeah I'm just using my low-key vlog camera today rather than the whole setup with the mic and everything so today's video pricing and the folks we're gonna have today a focus of today's video is going to be the four steps to pricing a commercial illustration Commission so and you could kind of change these or tweak these a little bit if the Commission was for a private individual so like for you know a portrait of somebody's grandchild something like that but definitely the focus is more on like the four things that you need to do the four steps that I would take whenever whenever I get an inquiry from a client on potentially providing a quote or an estimate for illustration work another quick note about this video is it's all going to be focused on value based pricing so really quickly value-based pricing is pricing that it's done based off of the amount of use the amount of value that the client is going to get out of that image so there are kind of two big main ways to price something value-based pricing and hourly pricing where you even figure out your hourly weight figure out how long the project will take you and then come up with a quote based on that value base you may consider some of the amount of time and the complexity and all those other things but the big factor the main factor is how much value the client is going to get out of the illustration and I have a whole video about why you should do value-based pricing and not hourly pricing I will link to that in the description and hopefully on the screen I think that's all I want to say and going to dive right into the fourth things now all right so number one when an inquiry comes in is to get the details so occasionally I want to client it it reaches out and they put everything that you need to know in that initial email but usually it's you know like maybe one piece of information that you need and then they haven't answered anything else or they might just say hi I work for a magazine but they don't say what the magazine is and you know I need a spot illustration but they don't tell you like what you're actually illustrating so it's much more common to get for me anyway to get an inquiry that is does not provide all the information I need so the number one thing I do is get the details it can be really tempting to respond right away and say oh we'll be this much but don't don't quote a price before you know what the job actually is and how the illustration will actually be used so again I actually have a whole video about this about the things that you should ask a client before you quote them and the pieces of information that you want to get which I will link in the description you can guess and then also will try to put it on the screen here but the two most important pieces of information that you absolutely must get from my perspective anyway are the the what so what will you Ellis trait like the subject the size the number of illustrations the specific style if you have kind of like a very variation or range and style the level of detail that's going to be involved etc so the the what of the project and how of the project so how will they use it will it be in print will it be on products will it be in media and those two things that what it's kind of going to tell you how much work is going to be involved on your end and the how it's going to tell you how much value they get out of it which is a big part of how it should be priced so get at minimum those two things before you provide a quote but if you want to be really thorough and you should because it will just save you trouble in the end watch that video about the things to ask a client before providing your vote again the link in the description okay so the second thing that I will do after I get the details actually may be ideally I would do it in the same email is to ask what their budget is and this is something that is often overlooked because it is kind of uncomfortable to ask for a budget and you can certainly skip it but in my opinion it saves a lot of time and a lot of headache if you just can ask it right upfront because the reality is that putting together a quote and an estimate takes time and that's especially true if you are yeah you know kind of thinking through it carefully think you're doing steps involved thinking through you know where you put it in your calendar how much work is going to go into it what the how you're gonna price it that all takes time and even if a very conservative estimate for me if it's a legitimate job if a legitimate commercial inquiry I'm going to spend at least 30 minutes putting together the quote and I wish I would sounds throughout it but but I am a pretty thorough person and I want to put forth something that is clear and understandable for the client and that I can stick with oh I know I can stick with so yes it takes that investment of time up front and so pouring 30 60 and maybe if you're new and you're learning how to put quotes together maybe even 90 minutes just down the drain on something that's not even gonna happen when you find out oh they only have a fifty dollar budget for a 500 dollar job it's going to make you more motivated to go ahead and ask even if it does feel a bit uncomfortable and if you are nervous to ask if you're thinking like oh well I wish I could ask the client sure it would be nice to know but like there's no way I can you know I can't I can't do that too nervous to ask the client what their budget is you could try phrasing it this way this is something I like to say I'm not just you know in the description as well that you can copy a piece if you want to before I put together a quote can you give me a bit more info about the project and then I will ask for those two pieces of information so the what what what you're actually going to illustrate and all the things involved in that so how how they will use it and the third thing all this is the budget so what the budget is and I I often will just say your ballpark budget and then I'll finish by saying and knowing these things ahead of time will help me put together some options that work best for your needs so you could also add a line that says something like if you don't know your budget or if you're just looking to get a sense for what illustration it will cost a very very rough range is you know X - X or x - y or whenever and again this will save you from wasting time on a client that has a $50 budget for what should be a $500 project and I'm not I shouldn't have even said wasting time I'm not meaning to minimize people who have a smaller budget but there are there's a pretty common phenomenon where people just dramatically undervalue art and think that something that is going to take hours and hours of time and get lots and lots of usage and bring in value and money for the client that it should just cost you know $50 or $100 because you're doing this says it's something that you love so yeah being upfront about that get a sense for what their budget is before you invest any time putting together a quote will just make things really easy and of course remember - if they come back with a budget that's kind of you know maybe in a ballpark but it's not quite where you need it to be you're not giving them all the power they're not saying well this is what the budget is now you have to work within that you can still negotiate up from there and same thing when you give the range you know maybe it feels a little bit nerve-wracking to put a range out there because you don't want to limit yourself but I would say just make it pretty big so overshoot the the top end of the range by at least 25 maybe 50% of what you you think you would need to get and then of course you can always tweet that once you have more project details but it just helps weed out some of the things that you could could end up being a really big I'm stuck to ask what the budget is all right the third thing I will do is to check pricing resources now I like to do this even though I already have kind of a sense my own internal priceless so to say so to speak and yeah I don't know what the term would be well yes I have my own internal priceless I've been doing this for a while I've done a lot of quotes but I still like to consult pricing resources because every situation is a bit different every situation has different nuance has different elements involved and especially if it's something that I you know I've done before but I think you haven't done a lot of I just like to check a pricing resource to make sure that I'm not like dramatically under quoting something that should cost more and my favorite pricing resource is the graphic artists skill handbook for pricing and ethical guidelines it's a big book that you can get cost about $30 all of these price ranges in there has tables that have like different price ranges for different areas of illustration so editorial illustration picture book illustration I think has comics as a separate one too and packaging advertising surface pattern retail product what else medical house it has a lot of different ranges a lot of different fields of illustration most of the book is focused on graphic design but there's like a few chapters that have these price tables and that's the reason I buy it because it's it's $30 but it is like so worthwhile to me to have a sense for like where I would fall in market and when I was very first getting started I would quote at the very bottom end of the ranges and now that I'm a bit more established I tend to quote more towards the middle of the ranges I hope someday to be confident enough to quote at the top end of the range is not just confident to be confident and skilled enough to do that but yeah so I like it has these ranges I like that you can just look up different industries yes it is all geared towards US markets so if you are in European markets or in other parts of the world non-english speaking parts of the world you'll have to adjust but it will still give you a sense of like what how value this pricing works because you'll see the demonstration that is like the same illustration if it's in editorial will cost one thing and if it's in advertising it will cost ten times more so and that's because of the amount of value that the client gets out of it so I still think it's a good resource for anybody for any illustrator it also has really good contract templates at the back that you can just take a picture of with your phone and upload to I think Oh er is what's called an optical bar see that will be somewhere in the description too but something that will actually convert the the JPEG the image to editable text and then there are going to be some other resources I will list in the description one is lightbox dot info I think Holly actually mentioned it in one of her recent videos and then a subscriber suggested it to include in this and I think it is really helpful because I work so much in packaging illustration there's not like a lot on there so if you're interested in packaging illustration it's not the best resource I would still recommend the gag guy but if you're interested in editorial or in comics or in children's book there are a lot of just examples of what different clients paid and different price ranges and honestly they're just like a really great group of people as well that are trying to be more to bring transparency to pricing in the industry and and I applaud that goal so actually it's been a goal of mine to go on there and upload some price ranges for different packaging jobs to hopefully fill out that section and maybe if you're a packaging illustrator and you happen to be watching this you could do the same and yeah so they could use a bit more variety but a great a great start in a good resource as well I could do an entire video about how to use the gag Guide or how I use the guide guide and maybe I will so let me know if you are interested in that but basically what I will do is I will look up the broad category so if it's from a magazine I'll look up editorial and then I will try to get a sense for the readership of the magazine so I will if it's one I haven't heard of I'll google it figure out how big it is and then the gag guide has like different tiers though they have smaller magazines mid size you know large national international magazines and then I actually get a lot of questions about this probably because I have mentioned and recommended the gag Guide so many times from people saying like oh I got this quote request but it's not this category isn't in the gag Guide and that is not uncommon and that's again that's another area why I like pricing is so complex because there yeah there are just so many different ways that illustration is used so may different ways that's produced so if you get a quote request for something it's not listed try to find the next best thing okay so like for example I I had a client request a quote request to license some images to use on bathing suit fabric for kids so that specific thing bathing suits for kids that was not in there and there is fashion illustration in the GAT guy but it's more like it's not it's not it didn't fit it didn't fit with like the the licensing of existing illustrations and I think most of the fashion illustration that they list is more for like you know drying the garment on the person not for actually doing like surface pattern design so I think I what I did was I looked up surface pattern and the categories and surface pattern are more like greeting cards gift bags tablecloths I don't think there is one for apparel but then I looked up a parallel astray ssin as well so basically I'll take whatever I can't there's not a clean like me fit for it I'll take whatever information I can about the client and the category that they would be in and kind of try to cross-reference several different categories from the guide and come up with something that is on the higher end of the middle so yeah that's how I would figure out figure out a price for something that isn't that I'm not familiar with and it isn't you just neatly listed in the gag guide let me know if you do want that full video on use again where I can actually like open it up and show you how I do it I would be happy to do that and then the fourth thing is just to put all those things together so considering all of the factors and things that you learned when you got to the further details the budget that the client gave you and then the the pricing guides that you have consulted then put all of that together to come up with your quote to come up with the range and of course I will go ahead and say this it goes without saying but I'll go ahead and say it probably thing is subjective and if you didn't know that already you could tell it by everything that we talked about in this video it's kind of like a back and forth and a weighing of multiple different factors and ultimately you're gonna have to decide for yourself what you're comfortable with and a price that ya price that you feel okay with quoting to the client and getting paid and I would also strongly encourage you to in addition to considering those other factors before you quote to consider the impact that your quote is the the mount that you charge the amount of us may to consider the impact that that makes on the industry as a whole so it's my personal opinion that it's not the people who are offering the $25 avatars for people's Twitter profiles that are hurting the industry because those folks were never gonna pay five hundred dollars for for an avatar anyway I think that the the thing that is hurting the industry is people perpetually charging which like at the very bottom range or just below the bottom range and keeping that price range there because some a client of commercial client like a magazine or a retailer or a brand they actually do have a budget you know they're not just like an individual person who has no idea what LLL astray Shinju cost are what value illustration has they actually know that illustration has a lot of value they need it to do their work they need it to sell their products but of course budget is a factor and so there are situations where they will go with the the lowest the lowest price and lowest bidder and so there's the temptation to to do that to continually undercut and keep your prices low I could do a whole other video on why you should why you shouldn't keep your prices low but I think that it is really challenging for beginners challenging for people who are just getting started so I would say you know don't feel like you have to be charging the high end of the gag range you can charge the low end of the AG range but don't charge 25% less don't charge 50% less than the low end and you may get that job but you are ultimately hurting yourself in the long run and you're hurting the industry as a whole because other people will be affected by that and you can even look at how little illustration pricing has changed over the years you know it's a it's an industry where there's a lot of work there's a lot of things that need Ellis tration but the price for a spot editorial illustration in with some clients is the same as it was 20 or 30 years ago which is just crazy so the pricing needs to be going up and people need to be more confident about quoting what their actual value what their actual worth is and if you are somebody who continuously undervalues your work and you've been working in this field for a long time yeah reach out and let me know and I well not even a long time like a few years if it's a if it's a challenge for you and I've made this offer before if you are brand new and you get a request from a client to do a quote and you don't have the gag Guide look it up on lightbox do a little bit of research but I am happy to answer questions and provide pricing advice I can't put together a whole quote for you but I will be happy to let you know kind of what a range what a reasonable range I think would be there are other illustrators as well that have mentioned that they're willing to do that I'm going to try to reach out to some before this video and see if I can put some of their names in the description box as well but the reason I'm willing to do that is because it's actually self-interest for me I want to make sure that this industry survives and that we can continue earning living wage and getting paid appropriately for the amount of skill that we have so it benefits me as well to help you in that way so yeah that's it those are the four steps I follow let me know if you are interested in the specific dedicated gag Guide video or a dedicated video on why you should charge more for your illustration and I think that's it thank you patrons for sponsoring this channel for sponsoring this video Thank You Meg for editing it and thank you you guys for watching and I will see you in the next video I feel like I'm forgetting something today but maybe it's just because this is the last video I'm recording today alright yep that's it everybody have a great weekend I will see you soon bye [Music]