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The Cost Of Art & Those Complaining About Costs
8 years ago
I've seen more complaints about what artists charge for commissions, lately.
I’d like to break this down a bit further.
Keep in mind, the following does not include any talk of trademark, ownership, re-print rights, or "sharing" on social media.
To own and maintain a small home in a moderately-pricey city, afford food, travel (gasoline/bus passes/etc.), insurance, taxes (usually self-employment is more expensive), and utilities you need roughly $40/hour if you are on your own. This is a (more-or-less) worst-case scenario.
All people, regardless of career, need to make this amount. If you are paying them less, you are saying that you think they should either not live in relative safety/security, should work longer hours, or are over-valued.
No.
No, they do not deserve living in poor conditions or onerous hours ... nor are they undervalued.
Next, consider a writer.
Drabble (100 words)
Flash Fiction (100-1,000 words [usually less than 750])
Micro Fiction (1,000-3,000 words)
Short Story (3,000-6,000 words)
Large Short Story (6,000-12,000 words)
Writing a story, even a commissioned tale where the basic plot is set-out for the writer ahead-of-time by the commissioner, isn’t like playing Mad Libs. They aren’t just typing down words. They are composing plot and structure. This is more than just paying a person to type at 90 words per minute.
A first draft, without edits, can be achieved in anywhere between 1,000 to 3,000 words per hour. There’s usually a minimum of 2-4 hours/story, too, regardless of length (just to put everything into place and sort out the plot/dialogue/setting/etc.). Plus, the longer the story, the more work has to be done in making sure the story makes sense and all the scenes are well-balanced and logical in the larger context of the finished tale. Editing takes multiple sweeps with several hours or days of not looking at the story between those editing passes. A single editing sweep can take 15 minutes/1,000 words. Even without charging for time during which the author is not writing/editing but, instead, just contemplating or digesting their work for future modification before finishing it, we’re looking at a roughly doubling effect for each tier in story length.
You get, roughly, the following time costs (including edits):
Drabble: 4 hours
Flash Fiction: 8 hours
Micro Fiction: 16 hours
Short Story: 32 hours
Large Short Story: 64 hours
Now consider the living costs for the writer if they have no other job and need to make the aforementioned $40/hour. A short story should cost around $1,280 USD. That’s about .28/word. That’s what is needed for a writer to write without any other job.
Please note my own prices for commissioned tales are much, much lower than this. And I would need to have people constantly paying me for my work at the above rates before I could quit my job and still afford my small home, with a paying renter, in a nominal suburb of Minneapolis.
Sure, there are modifiers to these numbers and circumstances for the individual artist/creator. If a person lives with others who share the costs of living, they do not need to be paid as much to live in the scenario I list, above. They may live in a less expensive area or a smaller home. But they should not be required to do so just to sell you art. I know many artists who live with roommates or have spouses/partners working full-time just so they can work, equally full-time, to engage in their vocation. In those cases, sure: they may be able to charge less.
Again: you cannot expect them to possess such personally-beneficial conditions.
When you see an artist’s prices, it may be more than you can afford.
Save up.
Pay them as you would want to be paid.
I’d like to break this down a bit further.
Keep in mind, the following does not include any talk of trademark, ownership, re-print rights, or "sharing" on social media.
To own and maintain a small home in a moderately-pricey city, afford food, travel (gasoline/bus passes/etc.), insurance, taxes (usually self-employment is more expensive), and utilities you need roughly $40/hour if you are on your own. This is a (more-or-less) worst-case scenario.
All people, regardless of career, need to make this amount. If you are paying them less, you are saying that you think they should either not live in relative safety/security, should work longer hours, or are over-valued.
No.
No, they do not deserve living in poor conditions or onerous hours ... nor are they undervalued.
Next, consider a writer.
Drabble (100 words)
Flash Fiction (100-1,000 words [usually less than 750])
Micro Fiction (1,000-3,000 words)
Short Story (3,000-6,000 words)
Large Short Story (6,000-12,000 words)
Writing a story, even a commissioned tale where the basic plot is set-out for the writer ahead-of-time by the commissioner, isn’t like playing Mad Libs. They aren’t just typing down words. They are composing plot and structure. This is more than just paying a person to type at 90 words per minute.
A first draft, without edits, can be achieved in anywhere between 1,000 to 3,000 words per hour. There’s usually a minimum of 2-4 hours/story, too, regardless of length (just to put everything into place and sort out the plot/dialogue/setting/etc.). Plus, the longer the story, the more work has to be done in making sure the story makes sense and all the scenes are well-balanced and logical in the larger context of the finished tale. Editing takes multiple sweeps with several hours or days of not looking at the story between those editing passes. A single editing sweep can take 15 minutes/1,000 words. Even without charging for time during which the author is not writing/editing but, instead, just contemplating or digesting their work for future modification before finishing it, we’re looking at a roughly doubling effect for each tier in story length.
You get, roughly, the following time costs (including edits):
Drabble: 4 hours
Flash Fiction: 8 hours
Micro Fiction: 16 hours
Short Story: 32 hours
Large Short Story: 64 hours
Now consider the living costs for the writer if they have no other job and need to make the aforementioned $40/hour. A short story should cost around $1,280 USD. That’s about .28/word. That’s what is needed for a writer to write without any other job.
Please note my own prices for commissioned tales are much, much lower than this. And I would need to have people constantly paying me for my work at the above rates before I could quit my job and still afford my small home, with a paying renter, in a nominal suburb of Minneapolis.
Sure, there are modifiers to these numbers and circumstances for the individual artist/creator. If a person lives with others who share the costs of living, they do not need to be paid as much to live in the scenario I list, above. They may live in a less expensive area or a smaller home. But they should not be required to do so just to sell you art. I know many artists who live with roommates or have spouses/partners working full-time just so they can work, equally full-time, to engage in their vocation. In those cases, sure: they may be able to charge less.
Again: you cannot expect them to possess such personally-beneficial conditions.
When you see an artist’s prices, it may be more than you can afford.
Save up.
Pay them as you would want to be paid.
So, yeah, thanks for sharing. :)
The idea of charging by the hour is a valid one, if one is a bricklayer, or a ditch digger. Art and writing are somewhat more than the task of filling up a blank sheet of paper. One should also take into account the act of creation as performance, where the performer has worked for years to develop their craft. People don't have an issue with paying $75 to see one hour of a rock musician's work, because they know that what they are seeing is the end result of years of practice, performance, and song writing.
In a similar vein, when someone approaches a writer or an artist for the purpose of creation, they know that they are not just paying for the hours required to create their singular commission. If they were, then there would be no difference in paying the creators whose work they most admire, and paying the same amount to any random person on the street. Would anybody seriously expect the same end-result regardless of who they commissioned? That makes the experienced creator a scarce commodity in limited supply.
Talent is another nebulous factor to be factored into the value of an acquisition. Two people might spend the same number of years honing their craft, the same number of hours in creating a piece of work, and yet have very different results in terms of quality. Mozart was a vastly greater musician at age ten than I could ever aspire to become, no matter how many years of work I put into it. This one is harder to sell, because I honestly question whether most people can even judge differences in quality (or whether it matters to them as much as subject matter). As a person grows in their craft, those distinctions become glaring, though. For those who are unable to judge relative quality, or do not care what they spend their money on, perhaps shopping for a bargain seems rational. I don't know.
The cost of a work is also an average, not necessarily based on actual hours, but on an aggregate of what the hours should have been. There have been stories that Inspired me to crank out seventeen thousand words in a single evening. Other times I struggle for days to fill a couple of pages. Some pieces of art practically create themselves. Others you can fight with for days only to eventually relegate them to the burn pile. I've had pieces that look simple, but they are the end-result of re-creating the same image six or seven times before I'm satisfied with it. For those who level the charge at me that such variability marks me as a flake, I'd probably have to plead guilty. Imagination itself is an aberration of nature. What use are fantasies to a turtle?
So a commission is partly based on they physical effort of cranking out prose or laying down lines—the idea of the hourly rate—but it should also factor in the creative effort of drawing on previous experience and learning, and the emotional effort of tackling subjects that may be difficult to express creatively. We are not bricklayers. Our bricks fight back, and must be subdued before they can be mortared in place.