5 Important Steps to Becoming A Full Time Artist
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@Nyrryl-Cadiz The more I hear about clients like that, the more blessed I feel to be working with the one I am. She did research on her own about what first time illustrators make for children's books, asked if I thought it was fair, and has always been open to my asking for more money if I feel it's needed (which I rarely do). She even compensated me when her firm delayed the project for three months.
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@lpetiti that sounds amazing. If only all self-publishing authors were that considerate.
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@Nyrryl-Cadiz Oh my gosh I am so sorry about that Nyrryl.
I think I've told you this before in dm, but my first children's book was on a shoestring on UpWork as well. But that was because the client was a family friend who want to gift their friend's firstborn child with a baby book, that I gladly did for $90. It was only 7 pages, I didn't give all my effort, they wanted a copyrighted character in it, and I didn't want to put my name on it, just in case that guy decided to bank it and I would get involved in a potential lawsuit.
Because of this, when a lady wanted me to illustrate a "professional" 30-page children's book for only $60! (I bargained for $100), I reluctantly accepted under the assumption that this was just something she wanted to use to entertain her kids. On the fourth week of the project, when I requested our agreed payment in escrow (that she honestly thought was an advanced payment) she all of a sudden started talking about publishing the book and wanted to know if she was obliged to put my name on it.
I tried to be diplomatic, but that only showed her true colors. After back and forth emails of me trying to be professional and reasonable, like negotiating a new price after she brought something up that was never in the original contract, as she name-called me throughout the conversation, I left with the money and told her she wasn't getting a refund. I left with $70. She later got some poor soul probably from Fiverr to illustrate the final version of the book. The art ended up being really nice, but it's clearly clip art, and the cover is really poorly put together. It doesn't even name the illustrator, it just has the author's name, not clarifying if they wrote, illustrated it or both.
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@lpetiti I think the clients who are not like that are not writing children's book because they are passionate about it. They are just basic suburban parents who need to have their egos flexed and will throw any illustrator under the bus to get it.
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@davidhohn Thank you for linking my thread.
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@Michael-Angelo-Go my gosh that person has an ego on them, practically wants you to kiss their boots for even considering to “let” you work.
This client I have is wonderful! She and her firm are super passionate about promoting literacy in our county.
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@Jeannelle I'm really sorry that one "client" got reactive with you. Usually, when I offer a quote, whether I was lowballing myself or being honest, they always say "thank you for your time" or runaway without saying it to my face.
I had one person approach me for a 10-page children's book and asked me how much it would be. I lowballed myself to $500 so they would bite the bait, but then they told me "well... I should do more research before making a smart business choice" translation: "I'm no longer interested".
I think it was two weeks ago, but an older colleague I know told me that he knew a guy who wanted to make a children's book. I wanted to provide realistic rates by charging $150 per page. My colleague let the guy know my rates and then they said "meeting moved to new date, to be decided" aka never.
I'm honestly surprised I myself haven't encountered a more hostile response. Choosing-beggars are always passive-aggressive, if not full-blown aggressive.
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@Michael-Angelo-Go It always cracks me up when people start a soapbox rant with "No offense...". It's like the precursor to guarantee someone will be pretty nasty, but justified in their mind.
I get what @Will-Terry is saying in the podcast about just getting work - you gotta do work to get experience and there's no way around that. I think it's worth being super cautious about this though for 2 reasons:
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If you lowball your clients, and you get people that accept those lower rates, it is psychologically difficult to re-define your value in your own mind once you get enough experience to be worth a larger sum. It's hard mentally to charge someone say $1000 for a project, then the next project that comes along SHOULD be $5,000, you have a difficult time feeling confident asking for what it's worth because all this time you've been charging 75% less than that.
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If you are getting work for lower rates and let's say you are doing an amazing job, those people will tell their friends "hey, I know this artist that does incredible work and he/she is super affordable" and in a year or two you might end up a word of mouth based client pool that is expecting super cheap art. So you then realize you're not making any money and getting burned out and NOW you gotta turn all these people down and find a whole new client pool that sees value in your work.
I think there's a healthy blend in there. Obviously everyone has to start somewhere. But sometimes we accidentally paint ourselves into the starving artist role if we aren't careful.
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@jdubz There was advice I've utilised from one of the SVS classes. Where you can keep your high rates but if they can't afford it, to offer a discount. When you invoice/quote them, quote the normal rate but apply the discount - and write it into the deal - so they know this is a special offer.
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@sigross For me, I told them $500 was a discount because they were a self-publishing author and it was only 10 pages and that the normal rate was $1K.
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I normally avoid name my price for as long as I can when working as a freelancer. I ask the potential client to tell me their budge instead. If I think the fee is not reasonable, I then tell the client the budget is too low to meet my standard and ask if they can raise the budget. If the potential client is not serious, he/she would probably stop coming back to me by now, which is fine for me. If a project is very interesting, and the client seems to be serious, then I can consider offering a discount.
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I normally avoid name my price for as long as I can when working as a freelancer. I ask the potential client to tell me their budge instead.
While your approach is quite common, I recommend that illustrators don't make this the ongoing tactic they use.
Instead as soon as you have enough experience to know what your work should be worth, the illustrator should put out the first number.To be clear -- I'm not saying this approach of first asking the client the budget should never be used, just that there is a time (two to three years into your career) that it should be intentionally phased out. The reality is that asking the client for their budget first puts the illustrator at a disadvantage.
For YEARS I read seasoned IP attorneys repeatedly telling illustrators to stop asking clients to name the budget. This was on an older discussion board TheiSpot.com. I was quite new to my career and so I didn't quite understand why.
A while back I came across a really good negotiation podcast Slate's Negotiation Academy. In episode 1 "Who Sets the Price?" this dynamic is covered. Scrub to 9:40 which is where they start discussing this topic.
If you only listen to one episode of the series listen to that part. But the entire 10 episode series is eye opening!
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@davidhohn Thank you for sharing the podcast. I really need some more negotiation advice.
Well, regarding naming the price: with established publishing houses, I would get an offer as a starting point for negotiation. I thought it was a good tactic to use for other types of projects as well. Now I am not so sure anymore, got to listen to the podcast you suggested :-).
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@davidhohn said in 5 Important Steps to Becoming A Full Time Artist:
Thanks so much for sharing this! I've always struggled with doing the "tell me your budget" thing because when I freelance with larger companies they always ask me my price, and it feels weird to try and get them to tell me their budget instead of just answering. It doesn't bother me so much when it's just a small company or person for some reason.
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@jdubz totally agree on this. I think you can accept lower rates if it serves another purpose- maybe it will be a great portfolio piece or maybe you agree with whatever the project’s goal is. It doesn’t have to be money but there has to be something in it for you. But keep your minsdset clear that you did not do it for the money only. Because you are right, it’s so easy to get trapped in the starving artist mindset. I think it’s good to have another job that brings some sort of regular income so you don’t fall into this trap when you’re just starting out.
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@Jeannelle said in 5 Important Steps to Becoming A Full Time Artist:
"But keep your mindset clear that you did not do it for the money only. Because you are right, it’s so easy to get trapped in the starving artist mindset."
I think you're right to say that you were willing to work on a project because there was something more to it than just the money. But I see some issues to this as well. If we were to adhere to what @jdubz said, your client pool might be composed of word of mouth clients that told each other that "this artist was willing to lower their rates because they believed in my message". Like a game of telephone, those other clients pay more attention to keywords such as "lower rates" and not so much of "the message". There are a lot of self-publishing authors with a "cause" and if they take a liking to your work, with the understanding of your previous rates, I'm concerned you'll get a handful of authors swarming at you asking to push whatever agenda they have for cheap.
I keep hearing people say that illustrators should charge cheap because they should focus more on educating children. While yes providing quality education through children's books are important, you get what you pay for, which does not bring out books of quality education.
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@Michael-Angelo-Go said in 5 Important Steps to Becoming A Full Time Artist:
I keep hearing people say that illustrators should charge cheap because they should focus more on educating children. While yes providing quality education through children's books are important, you get what you pay for, which does not bring out books of quality education.
I've always tried to look at this like charity - while it's important to give back, but you gotta assign it some boundaries. For my website company, we look for one organization locally we can help at a super reduced rate. We're not taking on all this discounted work, but it's a targeted decision to help one organization with our best work without feeling like we have to starve to do it.
I don't know how that would translate for illustration clients, but I imagine in time as you built up reputation you could probably find a way to do something similar where you have a focused amount of work your going to give away at like 25% because you believe in the cause.
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@jdubz I think that's very reasonable. When I mentioned that it was more like that person believed that this should apply to all illustrators on all children's book projects. Basically, they believed all your projects are inherently charity by nature and that if we want to make a living through our services, they said we should just try to sell our art and not make books.
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@jdubz exactly!
As someone who had to take on cheap jobs just to get a paycheck (by necessity, I started out freelancing on Elance, which has now become Upwork, right when the economy tanked in the US), I’ve been there!
One thing I’ll add is that I personally found it hard to break out, to find that confidence you spoke about and ask for a fair price. Especially since I had a good reputation on Elance and had a lot of offers coming my way — I DID start to charge more, but since your rates are posted front and center on your profile page and your job history (along with the price) is right below that, you have to raise them incrementally. It was VERY SLOW growth, something that I still feel the ripple effect from even 11 years later. Now, looking back, I wish I would have negotiated for higher pay right at the outset, but being naive and desperate for that one job to get started on, I didn’t.
But on the positive side, like @Will-Terry said, it gave me a lot of experience! And I got some of those bad illustrations he talked about out of my system.
So on the one hand, it stunted my professional progress. On the other, it gave me some valuable experience that will only help me moving forward.