Photographers’ Agents Share 4 Tips for Pricing Your Work
If you’re a freelance photographer, it’s time to join a professional association. You should always be charging usage fees. Oh, and rental, equipment, and post-processing fees. It’s a terrible idea to sign away your copyright. And yes, you can (sometimes) call an agent just to ask for advice. In this quick guide, we’ll dig into the “why” behind each of those industry rules.
In today’s market, it can be difficult to know where to start when pricing your work, and it doesn’t help that talking about money in connection with art continues to be something of a taboo. To help demystify the pricing process, we asked a handful of leading artist agents to tell us how they determine and set prices. Read on for their best tips.
Tip #1: Learn about usage rights.
This tip is especially important for photographers working with brands, companies, and publications: “All job quotes should consist of your standard day rate, an expenses breakdown, and then usage fees on top,” Meesh Bryant, the founder of BOLT Agency in the United Kingdom, tells us. That final fee will change based on how and where--and for how long--the client plans to use your images.
Several agents recommend this Usage Calculator from the Association of Photographers as a general guide. It’ll give you a ballpark estimate of what to charge for additional usage rights--say, if your client wants to expand to new territories or use your images for a longer period. “For photographers just starting out, I recommend looking through this resource to understand the monetary value of usage rights,” Meesh says.
Finally, protect your copyright. This tip emerged time and again throughout our interviews with the experts, but perhaps the Artist Manager Norma Jean Markus put it most succinctly: “Whatever you do, do not give away your copyright. Never, to no one.” When you own the copyright, your clients can use/license your photos for a specific duration; when time runs out, they’ll need to come back and re-license the images.