Assignment Photography: How to charge and price up assignments - part five
photo credit: Lili Vieira de Carvalho
Welcome to the final part of the tutorial on pricing up assignment photography. This part is going to show you how to apply your base usage rate (BUR) to assign license extensions for re-use of your images in a real world example.
In part four of this tutorial we priced up an initial licence for a commission to shoot a Fitness Centre brochure.
We granted a one year use for brochures and web in the UK as our initial licence included within our shoot fee.
How to handle a request for re-use or a licence extension
The images are delivered and you’ve been paid. Six months later your client calls you and says they want to run the images again in fitness magazines in the UK as advertisements. They are also building a fitness centre in Germany and want to use your images in a German edition of the brochure and they want to reprint the brochure next year, but only for the UK, so need a one year extension to the licence.
Lets refer to our handy re-use fees table. This one is produced (and is ©) the Association of Photographers (AoP) based in the UK. The table shows you guidelines for how to price up the additional license uses. It is freely available to download as a pdf from the AoP copyright4clients site here. It is designed to allow you to take your initial Base Usage Rate (BUR) figure and use the table as a guide to price the licence extensions.
Lets look at this table in detail. Click the thumbs to enlarge.
List of additional media types and time periods
List of additional territories
Each table has a range of percentages (%) upon which to base your negotiations. The AoP recognise that in any business there must be room for negotiation so this table is used as a starting point for those negotiations. It gives you, the photographer the confidence to price fairly for additional usage. It gives the client the knowledge that you are not plucking figures out of the air.
Using this table to price up our assignment re-usage example
Our client wants to buy the following additional usages:
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1) UK magazine advertisements for 3 months
2) German version of the same brochure
3) One additional year’s usage for UK only
In part four we set our BUR at £1500
1) UK Magazine advertisements: Call up the media types page and look down the column until we see “press includes magazines, newspapers etc.” Look along the row. Additional media types within the initial use period are charged at 100% of BUR. But our client wants 3 months use only for three ads in a couple of magazines.
In this case I would charge 33% of BUR for 3 months UK magazine advertising. 33% of £1500 = £495
2) German version of the same brochure: Call up the territories page and select “single additional country”. Look in the “principal media” column as we’ve already licenced for the brochure media type for use in the UK. The table recommends 20-100%.
In this case I would charge (depends on the client size of course) 50% of BUR for additional territory = Germany. 50% of £1500 = £750
3) One additional year’s usage for UK only: Call up the media types page and look down the column until we see “Brochures” Look along the row. Additional year after licence period is charged at 25-50% of BUR. Look down the media type column for “Internet”. Look along the row. Additional year after licence period is charged at 30-100% of BUR.
The client wants both UK brochures and internet for an additional year. Internet is fast becoming the most widely viewed advertising media (especially for high-traffic websites) so you should not see Internet use as being a lesser option than print.In this case I would charge 75% of BUR for the additional year UK brochures and web use (giving the client a 25% discount on the additional year) 75% of £1500 = £1,125
Total cost to client for additional uses = £495 + £750 + £1,125 = £2,370
But hang on PP, that’s more than they paid you for the original shoot….how can that be right?
The golden rules of usage
a) Use of the image not time it took to shoot
Remember, the original shoot we priced up in part four was for one year UK only in two media. We undertook the shoot based upon that usage. We priced the shoot based upon that licence to use. This is the essence of usage. The more widely an image is used, the more you, the photographer should receive. This is not Royalty Free and this is why assignments should never be priced based upon time.
Also realise that in this example, your client’s spend for advertising in magazines and printing/distribution of a second language edition is going to be far in excess of your additional usage fees.
b) Use the BUR system as a way of creating building blocks of pricing so that you can handle any request for any use, any time, any territory with confidence and the ability to negotiate.
Final thoughts….
That just about wraps up the five part series on pricing assignment photography. I hope you found it useful and it has given you a methodology to be able to price your photography based upon the benefit it gives to your client; not the time it takes you to shoot.
If your client is buying extra usage, multiple medias, territories or time then by all means haggle, barter, negotiate. Assignment photography is a business like any other. Businesses do deals every day of the week. Nothing wrong with negotiation, just make sure you always get something out of it.
Quid pro quo Dr Lecter? ;)
PP
p.s. if you need to start from the beginning here’s Part One
