Some Thoughts On Commissions · 3:04pm Aug 1st, 2022
The conversation comes up every now and then: how expensive it is to commission an artist or an author.
I have never taken payment for a work nor have I paid for a piece. I don't think I've ever even made a request either. Maybe that's just part of my social anxieties (fear of talking to people). So I've never really taken the time to think about it myself. But the conversation kicked up again recently in one place I frequent and at the same time I have three different people asking me if I do commissions (the most I've ever had honestly). So here I am seriously trying to answer the two big questions.
1) Should I do commissions?
2) How much should I charge?
From a customer perspective I understand why the conversation is usually so hostile. We customers are selfish little bastards. We don't want to pay for things. Artists and writers should just make stuff for us for fun! But "Fun" doesn't pay the rent. It doesn't put gas in the car. It doesn't put food on the table. It takes time and time is money. Why shouldn't a creative person get paid for their efforts, skill, and knowledge? Because their work is just a "hobby"? How often do hobbies become small businesses or full-time jobs? If someone is willing to pay, why not take their money? Because there are others who don't want to pay or cannot? Does "hobby" mean you are a "charity" just trying to make others happy? If you do commissions and not requests (because it really has to be one or the other) do you only care about making the wealthier happy? Those are other tough questions to answer.
The first problem "should I do commissions" is not simple. It creates a definitive divide between hobby and work. Once money is involved there is no screwing around. No excuses. It is serious.
The second question leads to no less hostile of a conversation. How often do you see forums of angry people complaining how "outrageous" some artist's prices are? But are they? Before I do some math for you, I would like to explain the logic behind it. Something my dad, being a man of logic and math, taught me that has been so useful when making big financial decisions.
Time = Money. This rule is so important to everything you will do in your life, whether you like it or not. Let's apply it to the work of an artist.
A job at McDonalds. What is the starting pay these days to flip burgers? Depends on where you live I suppose. Around where I live I know one that's offering $12/hour to start. Good enough for our purposes. So if I took that job, my time is effectively worth $12/hour. Am I wrong? Anything that takes an hour of my time is effectively taking me away from work and earning that $12/hour. Of course a man cannot always be working and needs to sleep and time to actually spend that money, but the premise is enough to make a point.
Now I'm also an artist. I take commissions. How long does it take me to make a work of art? If it takes four hours, is that piece not worth $48? Each hour of my time is worth $12 and it took me four hours to make it. It wasn't simply part of my hobby that I chose to make of my own will. Someone asked me to go out of my way to make it. So should I get paid my hourly wage for that time spent working for someone else? We can get into arguments about speed of work and efficiency, but we're just splitting hairs at that point. Is $48 an unreasonable price for a "good" piece of art? To me it doesn't sound too ridiculous, but there is one problem with this example: the hourly pay is low.
What should be the hourly rate for an artist? That's the real question. It's not something any idiot can do. It takes years of practice and study to learn. Unless you just want a pencil outline or a fancy stick figure I guess. So a skill that isn't so easy to come by tends to demand a higher wage. Let's do another example.
$20/hour. Sounds pretty good. Assuming you worked 40 hours a week you'd be making more than $40,000 a year. Is that the kind of income an artist should be entitled to demand? To me it sounds pretty reasonable. However, if that artist takes four hours to make a piece for you, that comes out at $80. That... I know that would hurt my wallet. That seems a bit high to me honestly. But if it's quality work, and you want it, why not pay it?
The real problem, I think, is the mindset consumers have. They see commissions as "buying a piece of art". That isn't what you are doing. In reality you are "hiring an artist for a short period of time". And any employer will tell you that wages is the biggest cost of doing business. I remember hearing somewhere that for the average business 80% of their operating costs are just employee wages. Ouch, that is crazy. Suddenly consumers see why companies try so hard to pay their workers so little. Funny how that works. We hate companies for trying to cheat us, then get mad when artists ask for payment.
But there is a big difference between artists and writers. For an artist, it is really tough to measure how much work they really did. Oh sure... we can bust out a piece and speculate ALL DAY how many layers there were, how long it would have taken to color, how many times they had to redo this curve or that line, or how well they captured the perspective and angles, etc etc. But with a written piece there is a much easier, if still a bit misguided, means of measuring effort: word count. The logic is deceptively simple: more words = more work. Let's explore that idea for a moment.
How fast can you type? Depends on the writer. A slow typing speed would be like 20 words per minute (wpm). Fast is anything above 50 wpm. Let's just assume something in the middle like 35 wpm for the following examples.
Imagine a decent length short story of 4,000 words. How long did it take to write? Easy math. It'd be 115 minutes or two hours. Good? No. You're ignoring three things.
1) who says ANY writer's typing speed is constant? I can tell you from experience it goes way up and way down. I've had times where I just got in a zone and was blasting away. Other times I have no idea what I'm writing and slow to an absolute crawl, maybe reaching 10 wpm for a while.
2) a writer has to think sometimes. I have never written an entire story, not even my flash fics, without stopping at some point to think about the next paragraph. You need time to plan the story, to organize, and to write. You don't just type and go.
3) editing is a bitch. You have to reread multiple times and you have to make tiny corrections. And big corrections. Sometimes you have to rewrite just a word, other times multiple paragraphs have to be scrapped. And heaven help you if you really bumbled the story and have to... start over...
Trying to estimate a price purely based on the word count is so wrong. It completely misunderstands how long it takes to actually write something. I'll be honest, I've never timed myself. How long does it take me to write a story? I have no idea. So I don't even know how to estimate it. The closest I can say is maybe a 1,000 words takes about an hour. Which would get me a typing speed close to 15 wpm, but I've already explained why that's not a fair measurement.
This brings me to what I suddenly realized only AFTER my last conversation with someone asking me if I do commissions. Something I find very amusing in hindsight.
It's not universal, but it is common, that writers charge $10 per 1,000 words. In my case that would straight translate to an hourly wage of about $10/hour. That is absolutely ridiculous. What idiot would take such low pay for a job that is both in demand and requires a degree of skill? That is bullshit! Assuming you worked 40 hours a week that's barely more than $20,000 a year. For a writer? Yet many authors in the community do just that. Though they could simply be faster typers than me and so the pay is a bit better. Just double the speed and you double the pay after all. If you can crank out 1,000 words of quality writing in 30 minutes, you'd be making $20/hour. Reminder, that's over $40,000 a year assuming you worked 40 hours a week.
In conclusion:
What is a fair rate for an artist? Or a writer? $10/hour? $15/hour? $20/hour? And remember that when you commission your favorite creator you're not buying their work, you're buying their time. Commissions are "expensive" because you're paying for skill and knowledge you obviously don't have. Otherwise you'd be making the work yourself. You don't hire a plumber if you could simply fix the pipes yourself after all. I don't know what to tell those who simply can't afford their favorite creator's prices. Maybe ask a different artist? Maybe try harder to save some money? If you want the most extreme suggestion, try becoming an artist/writer yourself. Though that's easy to say yet hard to do, right?
Fun thing in that last bit of advice though... because that's what I did. There was a kind of story I wanted to read, but no one was writing it. I couldn't stand waiting for it, I didn't have the courage to request it, and I didn't have the money to commission it. So I started writing for myself. Somehow that got me where I am today. So I tell you to try becoming creative yourself because... that's what I did. Now I don't need to ask someone else to write a story for me. If I want it, I can make it for myself if I really want it. Though if I want a good piece of art...
So take what you want from these rambles. Hope you learned something or gained a new perspective on things. That's my goal in life after all.
Such a common thing is so complicated. Your work is worth as much as people are willing to pay for it and as low you are willing to sell it. It's all subjective. I wouldn't pay for a commission but I wouldn't demand it for free. Those things have to be expensive. They are "handcrafted" and personalized. If you buy a mass produced phone case, it's going to be much less expensive than a case made by hand by a single person, added to the fact that it was made specifically for you.
Depending of the percieved quality of the story, the person who asked for it will think is was worth it or not. The satisfaction will tell if the story was too cheap or too expensive.