“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.”

This week’s podcast question is from Annabelle:

“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.”

Ooft. 

This is a juicy episode. Money, mindset, value, VAT nightmares, and charging what you’re worth. 

Bon apetit from your Good Ship pals. 

Tuck in.

Timestamps

00:00 – The question: “How do I stop undercharging?”

01:30 – People can feel when you don’t believe in your prices

03:00 – What affects your value: niche, profile, usage, experience

05:00 – Editorial vs publishing vs live illustration: pricing realities

06:30 – Raising your rates to manage your workload

10:00 – Calculate what you need to earn (and start from there)

12:00 – Most illustrators can’t actually work 8 hours a day

14:00 – Self-worth ≠ pricing strategy

16:30 – Add 20% and see what happens

18:00 – TL;DR: You’re probably undercharging

Stuff we mention:

• The AOI’s Pricing Calculator
• Jessica Hische’s brilliant tool: The Dark Art of Pricing
• Our Business Course for Illustrators gives you the pricing confidence (and strategy) that no one teaches you at art school.
  → Join the waiting list
• Freelancer’s Bible by Alison Grade – super helpful if you like numbers and practical steps

Have a lovely week. And up yer rates.

x Helen, Katie & Tania
 The Good Ship Illustration

Come and say hello!

✏️ @thegoodshipillustration
🌏 www.thegoodshipillustration.com

p.s. We love answering your illustration questions. Click here to submit your question for The Good Ship Illustration Podcast 🎙

Transcript

Undercharging / pricing dilemma
===

[00:00:00] 

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. This opens such a big conversation, doesn't it? Because people undervalue things if you undervalue them.

You know, freebies, favours. Those will be the worst jobs you'll ever do. Oh, yeah. Yeah, favours for friends or family will be nightmare jobs. But changing how you value things and externalising that, just gets you a whole different, um, [00:01:00] area of respect for your work. But it is difficult, we know that. I like Katie's, um, Katie's thing of, it's all made up.

It's all made up. It's all completely made up. But you do totally have to value your own work first. Cause, 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. And 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.

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 worth, your work is worth, depending on your profile, how long you've been an illustrator, where it ends up, you could argue those things, [00:02:00] they do help a bit, but ultimately, you know.

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 values gone right up and you've only got a year's experience. I know for Helen in the publishing, it's quite set, isn't it? It's quite set.

The, you go 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 will 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. 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. And then you can go back and say, actually, if you paid me that, I, 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 [00:03:00] 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. Cause they really relate it to how many they think they can sell.

And the same as editorial, you can't go to a magazine. They won't ask you what they, I mean, they might ask you your fee, but mostly they'll say the, this quarter page is always 350 pounds or they, they have a set budget to produce a magazine based on the advertisers. Um, what they gained 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 figures. Yeah. Marketing. People talk about like what the market can stand. I think that's quite, cause that you can think about that logically for each niche bit of the illustration industry.

So I [00:04:00] 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, Oh, amazing!

Yes! Sign her up! Like, book her in! 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.

Yeah, it's really feeling your way, isn't it? I mean, it's a relatively new field of illustration. So [00:05:00] it's a slightly wild west in terms of, uh, pricing because like you said, there's still lots of live illustrators that you've discovered have been charging way too low for a day's work. Yeah, because they didn't know.

They didn't know. And they're thinking of like oldie day rates of like, it's 250 pounds for the day in London. Like that's old now. It's not applicable for live illustration at all. Yeah, because it's completely different. And they're gonna be using, you've almost gotta have your licensing head on, like they're gonna 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 shit they've been saying, like it's worth much more than 250, 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, 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. It could be anything, [00:06:00] depending on the value to them. So that, 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?

I was talking to, um, 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 percent or it might've 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 pounds 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 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 percent off and give it to the agent. Now take 20 [00:07:00] percent off for your tax. What are you left with? You really can't make that work. Um, which is, it is really difficult. It's really difficult. This is why I have a literary agent because literary agents, their percentage is way less.

Yeah. Or you could do it without an agent. There's no need to have an agent. It, there's so many. Uh, 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, 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 hope and thought, right I'll just keep illustrating.

Oh yes, okay to that, okay to that. And I [00:08:00] never looked at the figures until the end of the year and used to think, God, I thought I'd earn 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 confidence that my annual income looked as closer to what I thought it should have been because you, 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. 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.

[00:09:00] And so, yeah, we had these messages back and forth where I was saying, I think you could find a literary agent. I think you could find a publisher who'll pay you more. But sometimes you, you don't know that. You think, well, what are every, 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. I think the AOI can help with this as well. If you're, if you're a member of the AOI, they have a pricing calculator, which is really good for some of the 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 a multinational that's approached you to do an illustration for their catalog, then it's very, very variable and the prices can.

Um, 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 that they, they [00:10:00] divide the job into three different sectors from doing it for a big company, multinational, a local, a national company, or a mom 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 like that, Jessica, heesh. It'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 a lot about this on the, um, on the business, Illustrator's 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 [00:11:00] God, it's making my head spin. Just a thought of it. One of the best things my big sister did when I was like, I want to be an illustrator. 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, like everything. And then how much time I wanted to work. And I think it's ages ago now, it worked out with like 35 pounds an hour. But then I realized I can't work six hours a day.

I don't have that much energy. It's like, I can actually only work really three hours a day. You've got like three good hours. Bearing in mind, this is live scribing that you're talking about as well. Although this was before I even discovered live illustration. This was just any illustration. 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, it, it would, I couldn't sit down for that length of time and make good quality of work over that length of [00:12:00] time. But a lot of the work is also research and some of it's thinking, you know, like agency people are 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 percent of what they do is just inspiration seeking and illustrators need to do a lot of that. Yeah, exactly. I think you're much better to underestimate how many hours you're going to work.

And then you've got loads of, 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 went to work, that's maths, you know, you can divide it and stuff. I'm sure there'll be online calculators and things.

There were, there were a few different ones. The one that's, uh, the Freelancer's Bible by. Something grade, you know, that Michael grade used to be head of the BBC. I think it's his daughter might've got this wrong. But she really drills down on your big sisters questions.

And she says stuff like, well, you know, if [00:13:00] you're in a, if you're in a job, you maybe you'd have holidays. You'd have development time. Think how often you might be ill and then 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. Um, 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 really go on self worth. Don't trust that, especially when you're starting out. But then I was gonna say, but this is tricky because I feel like illustrators default mode is self doubt and like, well, work's not good enough.

But then also I see the flip side where people's work maybe isn't that great. [00:14:00] 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 Well, maybe you need, you have to discover that in the way that you did, Katie. So you became fully booked at that rate. And so you knew that you were good enough. You were being in demand enough that you could put your prices up. And then you, your work progressed and then you're in demand even more and so you can put your prices up.

So you sort of follow how much demand there is for your work. 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.

It, 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 [00:15:00] 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? No, not really. I can't remember any, actually. Um, I learned most business stuff from my dad who sold cars. Yeah. Legend. Yeah. He's, this is why the Kachips here is because of Helen's dad.

But it takes so long and their 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 percent increase as well. I think Helen was the original thing, because you always, with negotiations, I remember you saying [00:16:00] early on, like, there's always 20 percent of work over. Yeah, always go back and ask for some more. Because the worst is they'll say no.

Yeah. 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. Yeah, so definitely come back and ask for some more. You'd be mad not to ask for that, but also you said put your prices up 20%, which is, you know, the tax rate, see how it goes.

Yeah. Cause when I went back registered in the UK, you have to, you get to a certain level, you have to charge back. Stupid and annoying and then you have to charge people 20 percent more. So when I did that, I was like sweating, lying awake, like, Oh, nobody's going to want to work with me 20 percent more.

And I did it and nobody even noticed. So I think like everybody can just charge 20 percent more. If you're going to start anyway, just do that. Yeah. I think don't base your sense of value on what you would pay. Cause 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 [00:17:00] 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.

What was it my mom said? She's like, I can't believe the NHS is wasting money on live illustration. It's like, wow, thanks mom. But they just go so short, 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 none of your business, what's in their pocket.

I love your mum's support of your career there. I will disclaim 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? That is interesting that when 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, [00:18:00] especially private clients out there have way more money than you could imagine. There's a lot out there. 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, uh, the publishers are paying. But once you're working in a different field and they ask you what your budget is. I think that's why people love having an agent or the idea of having an agent. It's like. That's true. Um, mommy to look after you 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, a general illustration agent. Yeah. Who would like to come and talk about pricing and fees. We'd love it. Get in touch. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I think we might have talked about pricing as much as we can without confusing people.

We're all hungry now. [00:19:00] Basically, put your prices up. Yeah, put your prices up. Bye. Bye.