Staying True to Your Creative Fee
[by Jenna Close]
As a general rule, I don’t lower my creative fee when negotiating pricing with a client. Since (as the name implies) this is the price I put on my own creativity, I want to retain the initial value I have placed on it. My feeling here is that negotiating pricing is a give and take. If I am going to give the client a lower price, then I have to take something away to make up for that difference. How can I take away part of my creativity? How can I do a ‘less creative’ job for less money? I can’t. So, if the client needs to reduce the overall cost of the shoot, the first item I start discussing with them is usage terms. Do they really need the rights to display that image on the side of a bus? Why not license the images for 3 years instead of 8? Giving and taking with concrete items like usage, post-production fees, etc (versus the more nebulous “creativity”) makes the interaction very easy to understand.
Jenna Close, along with partner Jon Held, run P2 Photography. They specialize in imagery for the alternative energy market. You can find Jenna at www.p2photography.net.
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I will negotiate a creative fee on commodity shoots: e.g. product on a white background but not on shoots which rely on creativity…