Assignment Photography: How to charge and price up assignments - part three
photo credit: Lili Vieira de Carvalho
In this part of our pricing photography tutorial I am going to start to describe a system for pricing up any assignment you are asked to do based on usage of the images you produce.
In Part One of the tutorial I showed you why making it up as you go along is not a good idea and in Part Two we discussed how you need to know your costs of business to be able to break even before you price to make a profit.
In this section we are going to discuss the pricing strategy. A method that can be applied across all commercial assignment photography sectors.
First PP rule of pricing: there is no rule of pricing
That’s not to say there aren’t methods; like the one I’m going to show you here. But photography is an unregulated business and nearly all practitioners are self-employed and thus there are quite possibly hundreds of ways to price photography assignments.
Over the years my methods changed too. To reflect changing times and copyright legislation. The 1998 Copyright Act in the UK gave us photographers back our copyright. Prior to that the copyright on our images was automatically given to the person paying for the assignment.
So the method I’m going to discuss here is pertinent only to those photographers creating images in countries of the world where copyright is automatically assigned to the creator of the image. For those poor photographers having to hand over their copyright, my commiserations and I hope you charge megabucks for the privilege!
Second PP rule of pricing: you need a constant if you’re going to licence usage
Why?
Well without a constant, a reference point, an agreed baseline, your client is going to think that you’re making it up as you go along. That leads to distrust and that’s the last thing you want. You’re going to be quoting your constant as an agreed creative fee.
Its upon this creative fee that the licences you grant for usage are going to be based.
We’ve already got a constant. But its not the one we quote to the client.
In Part Two we worked out your “need to make per day rate” or NTMPD rate. That was based on 104 shooting days a year. It shows you what you need to make on each of those 104 days to break even.
If you haven’t got this figure yet - go do it now.
That figure is constant. It is a baseline that you apply to the variable (104 shooting days). You shoot more days, you can afford to earn less and break even. You shoot less days, you need to charge more to break even. Except we don’t want to play it like that. Nobody wants to work 365 days a year for $50 a day do they? :) So the constant we got for break even should stay rooted and fixed. If we shoot less then our constant is wrong and should be higher. If we shoot more then we make profit.
But we are going to work out a profitable constant for our markets that makes us profit on our projected 104 days shooting.
Third PP rule of pricing: sectorize your market
PR grin and grab photography is not going to pay as much as above-the line Advertising photography. Editorial is not going to pay as much as a below-the-line gig shooting a brochure for a local manufacturing firm. That’s how it is all over the world in every industry. A Kia car is cheaper than a Lexus etc etc..
So although we have a constant we need different constants for different sectors. It’s OK, this is quite common. In fact, IMHO its the best way to know that you are always pitching your prices so that you remain:
a) profitable; and
b) accountable to your client; and
c) with a system that can be applied not only to the assignment and its usage, but to repeat and additional uses of your images too.
The constant you are going to be working with is called your Base Usage Rate (BUR) and I’ll show you how you apply that in Part Four.
PP
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