Pricing Your Art Licensing Work

Let’s be honest, pricing your artwork sucks. But we’re here to make it suck less for artists like you!

There’s a lot of fear, vulnerability, and lack of transparency & education about pricing art licensing work. We want to talk about how we price our work so you can hopefully start to feel better about pricing your own!

One of the reasons it’s so important to talk about pricing our work is so that the industry as a whole can create higher, more consistent pricing - that way everyone wins!

Go beyond pricing, what value does your work bring?

Sometimes, our clients haven’t worked with artists before, so they’re not sure what to expect when it comes to pricing.

Educating your clients on the value of your work is one of the most important things you can do before you give them a price.

Reiterate the IMPACT of the work, which will last much longer than the length of the project. Even a greeting card is so much more than a $4 transaction, it’s an experience from one person to another.

Plus, the volume a client could sell is directly impacted by the beautiful artwork on it, which you deserve to be paid for.

Pricing Your Art Licensing Work

Before we go any further, if you’re wondering WTF is art licensing, watch our video “An Introduction to Art Licensing for Beginners” here!

What’s the budget?

Let’s start with the client’s budget. It never hurts to ask! This could be a project they outsource regularly, so it’s always a good idea to check.

We like to think of pricing as a sliding scale that moves up and down based on a few factors:

  • Project Scope

  • Deliverables

  • Usage Requirements

  • Territory

  • Reach of the Project

  • Project Timeline (potential rush fees)

When you’re granting someone a license to use your work on a product, there’s going to be a shelf-life to the product. The lifecycle might be a season or a few years, and it’s something to consider when pricing your work.

The Ballpark Number

With this information, we are able to figure out a ballpark number that starts with our hourly rate. We don’t recommend pricing hourly, but we like to use it as the foundation when pricing our work.

We also like to check a few resources when we’re pricing our work:

  • Ask a friend who’s done a similar project

  • Jessica Hische’s Dark Art of Pricing

  • The GAG Handbook

  • Our Price With Purpose Guide

Side note: our guide has over 35 case studies with real numbers from real artists like you, sharing project scopes, payment details, and even how the artist felt about the project and the price!

The Pricing Sliding Scale

After we’ve got our ballpark price, we head back into the sliding scale and consider the things that will affect our baseline price. Rush project? Slide up that scale.

Want an example? In our latest video, Ilana goes over how we go about pricing greeting card design projects! She also drops the BEST tip she’s gotten on pricing artwork. Watch it now!

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