DOUBLE-SECRET PROBATION BUDGETS
A job offer came over for us to draw a dozen or so spot illustrations for a book, in a specific style. I asked the client, an author, “What’s your schedule and budget?” the answers which would help to guide me through our talent roster of proper artists. I could then work with my managers to match up schedule, budget, and style to the best available talents.
The client replied, “I’m doing this on my own dime, not a big budget, but want to make sure I get the right artist for the job. I hope that’s enough info to get the conversation started!”
The problem here is, other author clients we’ve worked with have set $175.00 as a reasonable out-of-pocket rate for a spot illustration. Others have said $35.00. Some $300.00. It depends, as you might guess, on a variety of factors. We did one job not long ago where the client apologized for “only” having a budget of three thousand dollars per page, for a nice group of pages.
The problem with a client being vague or coy about an actual, concrete budget for an assignment is that they, and we, both spin our wheels. We at Glass House Graphics could spend hours combing through 120+ artists to determine who can match the style, since many of our artists offer multiple styles — some of which aren’t even in their posted portfolios but we have here on file (because they’re not oft-requested styles).
We could even have multiple guys and gals putting in hours of sweat doing specific tryouts, racking up the equivalent of hundreds of dollars in samples, just to land the job. It’s one thing if each spot illustration is $200 each…. quite another if it’s $100 each, or $50 each, or $25 each. And because an artist available tomorrow might not be available seven weeks from now, scheduling is also an issue.
We can’t necessarily go to the exact same talent pool for a $50.00 spot illustration that we can for a $300.00 one, though all of our people are professionals. Some simply are in-demand enough to achieve certain pay scales.
One recent example: A client came to me talking of grand plan. He explained that he needed a hundred pages of comics, in specific animation styles, but wanted “only the top Glass House people” in those styles. That meant such guys as Fabio Laguna, who make upwards of $350.00 a page for that type of work, often as much as double that, working for Disney and DreamWorks. Or such gals as Tina Francisco, an amazing cartoonist who is also our best animation storyboard artist and should be paid accordingly.
I carefully assembled examples of several such artists for the client, determined their exact schedules and availability, and made the written presentation — and only then did the fellow reveal he’d had a budget all along of $50.00 per page, hardly a budget to support hiring “only the top Glass House people.”
How did he think keeping that information hidden would actually help the process?
