Chewing Pencils

In this series I will take you through a project I recently completed for a small client in Melbourne. Feel free to ask any questions about why I did what I did!

To start with, here is the intial email I received from the client and my response:

My name is Stephen from Melbourne and I am interested in hiring a freelance cartoonist to do an illustration for me. I am about to start performing health assessments, providing patients with their biological age which they can compare to their chronological age. I would like to create a flyer/poster with a youngish (20-30 year old) person looking into a mirror and the reflection being an old person. The heading would be something like “How old are you really?” It doesn’t have to be anything complicated, just highlighting the fact that a person’s internal health can differ greatly from their external appearance.

The drawing will potentially be used numerous times, maybe as a poster in fitness facilities but also potentially on flyers used in letter-drops etc. I don’t have a huge budget but was very impressed with your drawings and thought it was definitely worth enquiring.

I would really appreciate your opinion re this project and a quote would be great.

Steve.

My feeling on receiving this email was that the potential client was an individual, most likely paying out of his own pocket, with little experience in the illustration industry. Thus, it was unlikely that he would be able to pay the recommended rates, but would be willing to pay a reasonable amount if it seemed like a fair deal to him. I decided to quote on the lower end of the scale in order to get the job.

My intial response was as follows:

Hi Stephen!

Thanks for getting in touch - I’d be happy to help out.

You’d be looking at about $100 for the initial image and then perhaps a re-usage fee for each additional use of the image. The copyright would remain with me, but you would have exclusive rights. That is, I couldn’t sell it to anybody else.

Let me know if this suits your budget. Re-usage fees are minimal - in the order of $10 to $20 depending on the usage, but everything is negotiable! Let me know your deadline too. I’m away for the weekend, but could probably start it Monday or Tuesday next week.

Hope all is well,

Matt

My suspicions were confirmed when I received the following reply asking for clarification:

Hi Matt,

Thanks for your reply. That sounds good, but am a little confused about the re-usage fee. (I’m sorry- I’m new at this!) Is there a fee for every time the cartoon is printed (i.e if 100 flyers were printed is there a fee of 100 times the re-usage cost? And if I use it on a poster and make 10 posters, does the cost become 10 times the re-usage fee?)

I look forward to discussing it with you when you are back next week. In terms of a deadline, by the end of the month would be great.

Have a great weekend away,

Steve.

Before putting pencil to paper (or stylus to tablet) I sent one final email to answer Stephen’s questions.

Hi Steve, It’s all a bit strange, but it does make sense after a while!

Down the track, if you wanted to print another 100 posters or something like that, you would pay a re-usage fee for that project.

The one re-usage fee would cover the whole hundred. Then further down the track, if you wanted to print the image on some t-shirts, you’d pay a re-usage fee for the t-shirt project, regardless of how many shirts you printed.

Does that make sense?

Matt 

Fortunately, it did make sense and the project went ahead. In the next installment I’ll take you through the conversations we had about the draft cartoon and negotiating the method of payment.