But, I Don’t Know How to Price It

[by Shannon Fagan]

Over the years, I’ve developed a collective resource for image license pricing advice.  Here’s a list of some of my favorites, from the theoretical to the pragmatic.  Take them as a seed start for investigations on pricing, and also with a grain of salt.  When pricing complicated assignments and licenses, I often refer to multiple sources at once.

Negotiating Stock Photo Prices by Jim Pickerell and Cheryl Pickerell DiFrank
An all-time favorite of mine for the strategies associated with developing a pricing structure in photography.

“Fighting China’s Pirates” Wall Street Journal Article by Owen Fletcher.
It’s interesting to learn how China is handling pricing relative to the rest of the world market

Getty Images
www.gettyimages.com

Corbis
www.corbis.com
Easy to use drop down menus which give an idea of how pricing is being assessed, and licenses written, in the traditional sector of the market.

iStockphoto
www.iStockphoto.com

Dreamstime
www.dreamstime.com

Fotolia
www.fotolia.com
Great sites to observe for how micro prices are handled.

Shutterstock
www.shutterstock.com
Microstock’s main subscription service

PLUS
www.useplus.org
Great resource for licensing standards, even if not directly related to pricing.

Photography Agents
They can be a great resource for current and accepted pricing practices.  Agents generally will take on a complicated pricing scheme for an upfront fee or percentage of the job.

Shannon Fagan is the Chair of ASMP’s Stock Imaging License Committee (SILC).

On Your Mark, Get Set, GO!

[by Judy Herrmann]

Let me make one thing clear – I am a big advocate of pricing by the shot or project.  With one or two exceptions (event photography comes to mind), charging by the hour just punishes you for gaining skills and investing in better equipment. It also encourages the client to try to pack as much work into the time allotment as possible, leaving you pressured to perform fast rather than perform well.

BUT, in order to charge by the shot or project profitably, you still have to know how long it takes you to do things. That’s where a lot of photographers’ pricing models really fall apart.   Most photographers, especially those with less experience, grossly underestimate how much time they actually spend on client projects.  A phone call here, an e-mail there, a little extra retouching – it all adds up to time on the job and if you’re client’s not paying for it, then, well, you are.

Try this experiment. Get yourself a bunch of stopwatches – the kind that will track cumulative time.  Assign one client project per stopwatch and every time you do ANYthing related to that project, on goes the stopwatch.  The moment you’re interrupted or move on to something different, hit stop.

If you’re like me (and pretty much everyone I’ve ever assigned this to) you’ll be shocked by how much time each of these projects actually took.  And, if you do this for 10 or 15 projects, you’ll get a whole lot better at estimating how long it really takes to do everything associated with a given job.

Judy Herrmann’s new blog, www.2goodthings.com, focuses on helping people earn a living doing what they love.

Staying True to Your Creative Fee

[by Jenna Close]

As a general rule, I don’t lower my creative fee when negotiating pricing with a client.  Since (as the name implies) this is the price I put on my own creativity, I want to retain the initial value I have placed on it.  My feeling here is that negotiating pricing is a give and take.  If I am going to give the client a lower price, then I have to take something away to make up for that difference.  How can I take away part of my creativity?  How can I do a ‘less creative’ job for less money?  I can’t.  So, if the client needs to reduce the overall cost of the shoot, the first item I start discussing with them is usage terms.  Do they really need the rights to display that image on the side of a bus?  Why not license the images for 3 years instead of 8?  Giving and taking with concrete items like usage, post-production fees, etc (versus the more nebulous “creativity”) makes the interaction very easy to understand.

Jenna Close, along with partner Jon Held, run P2 Photography.  They specialize in imagery for the alternative energy market.  You can find Jenna at www.p2photography.net.