Sorry for the long absence. I’ve been tied up in business-related tasks. The most daunting one for me is trying to establish prices. It should seem like a simple theory: figure how much your supplies cost, figure out your overhead, and then determine a fair labor rate. Add them up, and you arrive at the cost of something.
That’s how it works in the standard retail world. One would think it wouldn’t be much different when pursuing the ways of the professional artist.
However, it hasn’t seemed to be so simple. There is the “figure out the above, and then multiply it by three” method, which appears in countless books and websites. There is the “figure out the above, double it to establish your wholesale price, and then double the wholesale price to determine the retail price” method that just seems slimy to me.
We’re encouraged to seek out the pricing structures used by those who do similar work, but that only served to make me feel very small. I can’t seem to make myself ask someone to pay $60 for a piece that I spent $15-$20 to make, simply because some other artist can.
Currently, I’m working with the method listed in the first paragraph, but the market just doesn’t seem to support such a simple theory…
