What must you ask for on your job?
It can be confusing figuring out what to charge customers. Even seasoned creatives often struggle with costing their jobs, and some prefer to leave discussions about fees and budgets to their agents. However, if you want to avoid undercutting your skills or losing a job because you've overcharged, it helps to have a good idea of what your time and skills are worth.
Director, illustrator, and animator Katy Wang learned the hard way the importance of negotiating a reasonable fee after pre-negotiating a fixed price for her first project, which turned out to be a much bigger task than she expected would have. “It was a huge amount of work for how much I was paid and how little time I had to do it. By the end of the job, I figured out how much I was actually paying per hour of the flat fee I was receiving, and it was shockingly low – lower than the minimum wage, ”she says. "Realizing that I probably should have been paid more for the time and energy I put into the job really made me decide to try and get paid properly for future jobs."
Wang now avoids paying fixed upfront fees unless she is working as an illustrator or animator on a project that is being led by someone else. “I charge around £ 250 to £ 300 as an animator and £ 300 as an illustrator / designer,” she explains. Since signing with Blinkink in 2019, she has spent most of her time directing jobs and typically receives a fee of around 10% of the total budget for directing a project, with additional work such as animation, design, or storyboarding billed become an additional daily rate. "When I started 10% didn't sound like a lot, but then I learned that commercial budgets are typically tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands," she adds.
Representation means Wang no longer has to negotiate fees directly with clients for running jobs and can ensure that she receives "fair industry rates" for her time. But for everything else, she admits that there is still no easy answer to what to ask for.