As an independent artist it is up to you to set your rates. Set your rates for what you are charging for your art and your creativity.
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This week, I’m offering you some tips on how to figure out what to charge.
I’m John Paul Fischbach. I’m the CEO and Chief Alchemist here at the Auspicious Arts Incubator, and this week we’re focusing on helping you set your rates. As an independent artist, it’s up to you to set your rates, right? So, when you try to figure out what to charge, I want you to consider three things: what you’re worth, fair exchange, and market value. So, I always want you to start with what you want, or what you need to earn. Now, you’re in the emotion business, so price is very elastic. Now, to make our life sustainable, we need to know our rates. So, figure out your hourly, daily, and weekly rates. So, I’m gonna give you two methods.
The first method is to divide the annual income you need… So we covered that in a previous Hot Tip. The annual income you need, by 1,600 to get your hourly rate. Okay. Now, there’s a whole bunch of reasons why 1,600. But basically, what we have found is that artists who can earn their living in 1,600 hours find sustainability. So, the annual income divided by 1,600 gets you an hourly rate. Then you multiply the hourly rate by eight, and you get your daily rate. And you multiply your daily rate by five to get your weekly rate, yeah. So for example, let’s say you wanted to earn $50,000 a year. So, that makes your hourly rate, divided by 1,600, $31.25. Your daily rate, $250. And your weekly rate, $1,250, right? So, that’s not a bad place to start. So, you could use that formula, dividing by 1,600 as a good place to start, but in my experience of working with artists for as long as we have, you’re worth more.
So, we just have a basic rule of thumb, so here’s the second method. Use our basic rule of thumb. Our basic rule of thumb is, $50 an hour, $400 a day, and $2,000 a week. So, try either of those and see how those feel. But you need to consider what’s called, fair exchange. Now, your art form might have an industry minimum, or an industry standard, or in Australia it’s called an award rate. So just Google “Artist Fee,” in your industry, and see what fair exchange is in your industry. There might be something, right? Remember that part of your job is to educate your client or your customer about what it takes to create the work, in their terms of hours.
The next concept is market value. And your gonna have to do some comparison research. Look at similar style. Look at similar artists. You know, look at what your ideal customer has paid in the past. You’re gonna have to visit some galleries, and some theaters that are in your target area to see what the market value is for work that is like yours. Okay. So, that’s what you need to do. So your work this week is to set your rates. Hourly, daily, and weekly rates. Now, if you’re a visual artist, we’ve got some formulas that you could use that help you figure out pricing for visual art. But, we don’t have time to go into that right now. So, if you want that, you really should consider leaping over to the ASAP Membership Program, where we’re gonna go into greater detail about all of this, plus give you the formulas if you’re a visual artist doing, you know, canvases or stuff that you hang on the wall. Okay. If this is helpful please share it with another artist. And as always, check us out when you need real practical advice for your arts. Thanks.
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