Pricing Your Work, Tip #4: Fees & Expenses in Magazine Photography | PhotoShelter (2024)

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts exploring pricing your work from our 3 free guides written with Bill Cramer, CEO of Wonderful Machine. We’ve been sharing tips via the blog all this week on how to price your magazine photography, corporate & industrial photography, and photojournalism. Get the guidePricing Your Work: Magazine Photography here.

Navigating magazine contracts with a new client can be tricky – here, Bill Cramer, the founder and CEO of Wonderful Machine will take you through three basic types of contracts, as well as what should be considered a fee, and what can be put down as an expense. This is an excerpt from our guide, Pricing Your Work: Magazine Photography.

Photographers traditionally structure their invoices for magazine work in terms of a creative fee plus production expenses. The fee portion covers your talent, time, energy and the license for the client to reproduce your photographs. The expense portion covers the cost of additional personnel, materials, equipment and facilities that are sometimes required to execute a shoot. Sometimes a photographer may choose to provide some of those expense items in-house, like when a photographer owns her own studio, has staff assistants or does her own retouching. Regardless, they are all billable items separate from the fee. And whether you’re actually breaking them out separately on the invoice or not, in order to run a profitable business, it’s important to understand where the money is coming from and where it’s going.

There are three basic types of magazine contracts:

1.Day Rate vs. Space

This structure is the most win-win for photographer and client. It scales the fee up and down depending on the time required to shoot the assignment and the space the photos end up occupying in the magazine. The fact is that art directors rarely know how big each story or picture will be until they actually send it off to the presses. Between the time an assignment is made and when the magazine gets put together, changing events will affect the relative value of different stories. And when pictures or articles are unexpectedly good or bad, their prominence in the magazine will grow or shrink. By paying photographers a minimum guarantee for their time, plus a predetermined bonus for extra pages (plus expenses), this contract allows photographers and clients to negotiate just once, then proceed with subsequent assignments with minimal negotiations. For most magazines, $500 per day vs. $500 per page plus expenses is reasonable for first editorial print use and concurrent web use. So if they end up using one 1/2-page picture (or no picture at all), the fee is $500. If they use onefull-page picture, the fee is still $500. If they use two full-page pictures, the fee would be $1,000 instead of $500. A guideline we use to normally price cover space is $1,000 to $2,000, and the price of smaller pictures is often prorated:

• up to 1/4-page: $200
• up to 1/2-page: $300
• up to 3/4-page: $400
• up to full-page: $500
• up to full-cover: $1,500

2. Flat Fee Plus Expenses

Some clients want the convenience of paying the same rate regardless of how many pictures they use or how big. That will make sense for the photographer if the fees are high enough or if the fees are moderate and the photographer is shooting regularly for the magazine. Sometimes they’ll win, sometimes they’ll lose, but in many cases, magazines offer a rate that’s reasonable for one 1/2-page picture, but not bigger. So this creates an awkward situation where the more productive the photographer is, the less they get paid per picture. This is not a recipe for a long-term relationship.

3. Flat Fee All Inclusive

Other clients offer a flat rate including expenses.That can work fine when the expenses and the usage are very predictable and when the fee is generous enough. But photographers can be easily seduced by offers that seem great at first, but then when they actually back out all of the expenses, reality sinks in. It’s important even in these cases to work up an estimate in the usual way to see what your fee really comes out to.

Terms & Conditions

In addition to the fee and the licensing, there are a few other details you’ll want your contract to address:

• Payment Schedule (normally 30–45 days from invoice)
• Advance (Get expenses up front if they’re going to be more than $1,000.)
• Copyright (Usage rights are effective upon payment in full—that way if they neglect to pay you, you can sue them for copyright infringement.)
• Cancellation (If they arbitrarily cancel the shoot within 24 hours, they have to pay a cancellation fee at least to cover all the sub-contractors you booked.)
• For the full list download the guide here

Expenses

It’s also good to have a list of potential expenses handy so when you’re putting together an estimate, you don’t forget anything. Here are the most common magazine shoot expenses (commercial rates are often higher):

• Assistant ($200–$400/day)
• Digital Tech (about $500/day plus workstation as necessary)
• Digital Fee (about $300 for a web gallery)
• File Prep Fee ($25–$50 for a reproduction file with basic touch-up)
• Retouching ($150–$250/hour)
• For the full list download the guide here

Let’s get started with tips for pricing your magazine work, you can get the guide here:

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