Pricing Work

Why do illustrators blindly accept fees before knowing the assignment details?

It is very common for illustrators to receive a fixed budget along with their assignments. This is especially true within the editorial and publishing worlds. Sometimes, the fees offered are decent or even great, but more often (in my experience), they are lower than what I would hope for.

A typical scenario might look like this: an art director of a magazine comes to you to illustrate a full spread and three spots for a feature in their upcoming issue. They say they can offer you $1200 for the set. On first glance, this looks great. Anything in the thousands seems like a pretty good gig for a freelance illustrator, right? Taking a closer look, though, this averages to $300 per illustration. That might seem reasonable for a spot illustration, but what about the full two-pager? Adjusting how the fee is divvied up, perhaps $200 for the three spots and $600 for the spread looks better? Now the fee for the spots is about as low as you might want to go, while the $600 for the spread still seems undervalued. Thinking strictly about the time spent on the work, depending on your experience, your process, and the details of the assignment itself, you could spend anywhere between 10 and 40 hours. If you can bang something out in 10 hours, you’re making $120/hour (before…