Chewing Pencils

You’re all set with your tax details.

You’ve marketed yourself and a client rings.

What the heck do you do now?!

As strange as it sounds, that first phone call or email often takes you by surprise. What we’ve dreamed about is now real, but it’s scary on all sorts of levels. We don’t want to scare them off, but we don’t want to do ourselves out of some money. Will they be confused by all the copyright mumbo-jumbo? What about if they start getting a bit pushy?

Welcome to the world of negotiation.

There are all sorts of different ways to approach your negotiations with a client, but I’ve found that the easiest way is to have a standard contract that you can send to a potential client, and to use it as the starting point for landing the project.

When somebody emails me, this is what the bulk of my reply consists of:

1. A list of the recommended rates for the the region. rarely does a client pay this high, but it’s a good place to start. When negotiating down, I have a lower limit, but rarely reach that too.

2. I state that copyright remains with me. The inital fee will include exclusive rights (ie I can’t sell it to anybody else) for that project, but any future use of the image will incur an additional fee.

3. Siginificant changes to ‘all but completed’ work will attract an additional 50%.

4. I make it clear that 50% of the expected fee will be asked for upfront. No drawing will be done until the deposit is received.

I’ll then quote on what I think is fair and what I suspect the client can pay. Quoting the recommended rates early makes anything cheaper seem like a bargain!

After sending this response, I never hear back from many people. That’s a good thing, because they probably wouldn’t have paid if I just went ahead with the project and tried to negotiate a price later. If I get positive reply, I expand the contract to include the following:

5. A start date and an expected finish date

6. The details of what the client has asked for. That is, the number of cartoons, whether they are in colour and the format they want them delivered in. I strongly recommend that the files be sent electronically, but occasionally a client wants them on CD. I add the postage costs on to the fee in these cases. (Note: I’ve never had a client request a hard copy).

7. The details of my terms of payment. This changes a little. Sometimes it is full payment no later than 14 days after receipt of the final images. Other times it is full payment before the cartoons are delivered. Usually the former.

And that’s about it!

There are often additional things that are added that are unique to each client, but all of my contracts include the points listed above.

It might sound a bit harsh, but using the contract helps speed up negotiations and encures you don’t get steamrolled into something that is unfair. If you make your working conditions clear early on in the piece, the realtionship with the client is much more open and the project, most of the time, proceeds smoothly.

Sometimes you’ll need to take a brief for a project. Sometimes this wil happen before a contract is drawn up, other times after and often it will simply unfold as the project progresses. I’ll talk about his in the next post.