Pricing Photography by Michal Heron

Author:Michal Heron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allworth
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Pricing Assignments

You have learned new techniques and are ready to begin honing your negotiation and pricing skills. Now come the final steps: putting it all together to create an assignment price. To do this, you will have to add together the results of a number of other calculations, all of which are vital. Creative fee, other fees, billable expenses, and any applicable miscellaneous charges will be combined to help you arrive at a total assignment price. This process is extremely helpful even in situations where your negotiating access to the client is limited. You need to know your bottom possible price for the assignment—the price you would walk away from. No matter how tough the economic climate, there are assignments it’s better not to take. Sometimes your time is better spent working on portfolio photographs instead of wearing yourself to a frazzle for a client who is likely to move on to someone else with their next low-ball shoot.

First, you need a road map. Sit down at the computer (or with paper) and write out everything you can think of about the assignment, including:

• What is needed

• Where is it to be done

• When you will do it and when your client needs it

• How you will do it—that is, what it will take and how much time it will take

• Usage rights required by your client

• Any other specifications that help define the assignment

Second, draft a few simple declarative sentences or paragraphs descritbing the assignment. By referring to this statement (which you will include in all paperwork to your client) and the Assignment Information Form, you can remain focused on the assignment’s vital elements that will affect your pricing decisions.

Creative Fee

As you remember (you have read the entire book up until now, haven’t you?), overhead consists of many fixed and variable costs that you must be compensated for so that you remain financially viable. Let’s review how a creative fee is calculated.

1. Determine your annual overhead total

2. Divide your annual overhead by the total number of assignment photography days you estimate you may do this year. This is your daily overhead, the amount of overhead you must recover each day you are doing photography for clients

3. Multiply the daily overhead amount by the number of days you will engage in photography during a specific assignment. This gives you a base creative fee. Never charge less than this amount, or you will lose money

4. The result is then adjusted by the factors found in the box “Pricing Factors” in chapter 2, and the result becomes your creative fee for the assignment. We diagrammed the equations needed for pricing an assignment in a more visual manner on the “Assignment Price Calculation” page later in this chapter

5. Quantifying these pricing factors is made possible through experience, a knowledge of the industry, and, especially and most importantly, talking to other photographers. The pricing charts in chapter 9 will also help you better determine whether or not you are in the range of what other photographers have found to be required to run a viable business.

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