lou-ellen 'The white Steven King' @louceph.com · Jun 18 1761 likes 29 replies
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this is why i stopped trying to do graphic design professionally. post is 5 years old, before AI was actually competing with graphic artists and still no one values the artistic skill that takes years-decades to hone. it reminds me of how landscaping went from being art form to minimum wage labor.
$200 is NOTHING
Did a book cover for a friend, the publisher wasn't happy with that because it wasn't one of theirs and they claimed they wanted constancy (gonna be honest they threw samples at me and there wasn't really any) and while I did work with my friend I barely got any feedback from the publisher,
200?!!!! that's unwell you gotta add at least a zero to that
Mother of fuck. Like, the two cover illustrations I've commissioned for my wife were 400 a pop, though some years ago...
Used to be you could make a month's rent doing cover art.
"ah yes THE first thing everyone will notice. the hyper important first impression. my book's face basically. time to low-ball another creative!"
Growing up, I used to browse my local used book store's sci-fi/fantasy/horror sections and buy cheap old paperbacks based on how cool the cover art was. Hard to do that these days for many reasons, and it's sad.
Dang I was prepared to pay at least 500 US ngl
giving an artist 1500$ to paint me a book cover on canvas
Good lord. I was hoping they'd get paid a lot more than that.
200 is crazy all book covers ive done start at 500 ?!??!
200$ for a book cover was good money back in the 1990’s its unacceptable now imo.
lmao fantastic post
I'm gonna say this is far lower than the usual rates I see mentioned on reddit. There's lots of designers offering services on there.
Every day I get upset I pay better
$200 is CRIMINAL $500 MINIMUM and that’s for like, a single person self publishing who has limited disposable income kind of schtick I’d say you SHOULD expect to pay $1000 or more!!!!!
I actively hunt down and collect all kinds of horror books like these. I always remember seeing them growing up when my grandmother would read them or just in a book store so now it’s really fun to own these cool pieces of art.
I experienced this recently, I was contacted a few weeks ago by an author who wanted to commission me a cover for her book on canine mythology, and she then said she had to cancel the order because her publisher wouldn't budget it out. ftr i was charging like, 300-350, and that idk, was too much??
Couldn’t find that original thread but there’s a more recent one from this week where the author is getting jumped for wanting to fairly pay artists. I know that many writers are in the same boat as us but it’s so weird to see animosity towards paying artists :/ www.reddit.com/r/writers/s/...
Aside from the fact that design tastes and sensibilities change and now ignoring how generally authors have more creative control over book covers than before (not immediately a bad thing but not necessarily a good one either), artists are also just not being paid enough
Unfortunately Yeah
Yeah I wish I could convince more musicians I know that paying $500-$800 for album art is normal and good, and paying more isn't even unusual, same goes for writers.
That pay's the real horror story.
Oh no, no no no, you'd be lucky to get that rate for NON-commercial work from someone where your currency is much stronger.
$200? No. Maybe if you are asking for only some color and fonts, but we charge anywhere from $600 to $3000 (or more) depending on many factors for illustrative covers.
As someone who has never paid for a book cover, but has paid for other art, it feels very weird to just give a number like that as a general price for art. Maybe I'm off but as a developer this feels like asking "how much would I pay for a website?" with no details on what they actually want.
200???????? i'd pay 500 at the very least