Poster Pricing Question

[Eugene C. Finley]

I am trying to get an idea of what most of you would charge or pay for this type of image? Price for a 12 X 18 and each player on the team will get one. Team consists of around 24 players.

If you are a pro and sell images, what would you charge?
If you are a consumer, what would you pay?

 

[Charles L Webster]

You create a unique poster for every player on the team? That sounds like a ton of post-processing time. That would make the selling price of the poster pretty high in my opinion.

 

[Asher Kelman]

See if Nill notices this. He should know. If he doesn't see it let me know!

asher

 

[Jamie Ice]

I took a quick look at mpix.com (one of the places I send my pictures to be printed) and a 12x18 costs $10.79 just to be printed. You will have to figure out how much time it takes you first to take the pictures, and then the time to create each one of these images and how much you feel you are worth per hour, plus a mark up on the printing.

If this was me (and keep in mind that in my area I am affordable compared to other photographers), I would charge $25 for each print, $20/hour for my time. That could get expensive, but people have to realize all of the work that it takes to create those kind of images.

Hope this helps!

Jamie
www.viewtimeagain.com

 

[Asher Kelman]

Jamie,

I like your poster. The price also depends on what the parents have been used to paying. A chat with the coach (if it's not you) might guide you. Why are you doing it? For fun, friendship, proud Dad or to earn a living? A poster can always be a good advertisement if you deliver it at the next game and the parents will be showing it around and will do advertising for you.

How much time will this take you and how much makes it worth your while. Remember, if this is for income you can't suddenly double your price!

If you are doing this, think of a whole line of products such as a team picture, with the coach and assistant coach getting a free print and let them organize it for you!

Nill toulme does this a lot so he'll eventually discover you and add his wisdom!

I don't know how the competition is but $20/hr is that of an unskilled helping lift things or a lower level office person. It would seen to me that even at $52,000 per year, you need to earn $200 average per day. Some days you will be processing or may have to scout or just talk to people: ie hustle!

So How many billable hours are there? Probably only 4 hours a day! You might do photography with a camera or printer at most 4 hours for 5 days. So you need to earn $50/ hour to meet your goal without paying for any expenses at lall. So to cover cameras, equipment etc, you need to earn that $50, hour and get profit from prints or else charge $100/hor as a minimum.

I cannot fathom how one can pay for one's expenses at $20/hour unless the sale of pictures and other stuff is guaranteed to make up a lot of cash you'll be missing.

So what price it is depends whether this is a sort of hobby with income, where this makes you happy and other people happy or whether you are running a business in which you have to make a profit.

If this is at a sports event and this is delivered by say exposuremanager.com, and you have an efficient way of uploading everything, then the price is not so critical since this is just one extra product they order with no more work on you part. So it depends again on how you are set up and what time this consumes and takes away from other opportunities.

Good luck!

Asher

 

[Jamie Ice]

Just to clarify, Asher, I was just responding to Eugene- he created the poster. As far as how much to make per hour, I think it greatly depends on your location and the economics in that location. Where I am from, the majority of people make less than $10/hour, so making $20/hour is pretty decent.

In addition, I think that, yes, it also depends on whether this is a hobby for Eugene, or a profession. I work full time during the day and do photography at night and on the weekends, so for me to make an additional $20/hour at a second job in this area is pretty amazing.

There are a lot of factors to look at, so it is up to Eugene to scope out the competition and see what others in his area are making.

 

[Kathy Rappaport]

Exactly!

Jamie,

You hit it right on the head. It's the economics of the area. While $10.00 per hour where I live doesn't get you any manual labor, the method of pricing is dependent on what people will pay as well as what they earn.

A starter home in Los Angeles is over $500,000 (for a real fixer upper) and to qualify for a mortgage (20% down payment) on that home, you would need to have minimum income of approximately $75,000 or $37.50 per hour. In other areas, that same home is less than half. But in those areas there is also less disposable income and you have another road block as well.

So it's back to what will the market bear? I think you'd need to have a workflow so that you would create the poster almost automaticaly to sell it at a price point for people to buy it and still cover your expenses. Don't forget that the depreciation cost of your equipment needs to be factored in as well as your time and materials.

 

[Asher Kelman]

Jamie, Hi again!

As a way of earning a living: I do know that sports team photographers for school children are very well organized and work so hard to do what they do. Efficiency and smiles gets them though. However, this is not a casual occupation for the timid. A photographer's life can be very hard during playoffs and champion games.

As a parent: Doing this part time, the amount you charge is not so critical not is your profit. You will always have more fun, saisafaction and thrills than the money represents! and anyway its just several dozen posters.. Not a lot of work if you have the templates, even if you print it yourself.

If I was a parent, $25 would seem fair. Your poster looks very good for me and i'd be proud to own one!

Asher

 

[Alain Briot]

Here is what I would do:

1-Determine how much time it takes me to create the image, including shooting time, research, processing, printing, fullfillment, etc.

2-multiply this by my hourly fee ($300/hr currently for me but your hourly fee may be different). So let's say I spent 10 hrs on this it would make my cost in time $3000.

3-Add the profit I want to make on this project. The minimum would be 2x but it can be much higher. Lets say I use a 3x factor, bringing the cost to $9000 in my case. Your situation, again, may be different.

3-Find out how many posters I can reasonably expect to sell. This means knowing your audience, how many people you think will buy it, and how much you can expect them to pay. This can only be answered by you since I don't know who your audience is nor what their financial resources are nor how much they value this product.

4-divide my costs by the number of people who I think will buy this item. So if I can plan on 10 people then the cost is $900 each. If I can expect 100 buyers then the cost would be $90 each. For 1000 the cost would be $9 each.

5-Finally, add to the prices above the cost of printing each piece which would be minimal. I expect a piece like this to cost me $5 to $10 in printing costs if I print it myself, and around $2 if I have it commercially printed via offset. However, offset requires from 1000 to 5000 copies to be viable otherwise you are better off printing it yourself.

6-So the final price is the price you calculated out in part 4 plus the cost you calculated in part 5. Let say you are selling 100 and printing them yourself then your selling price would be $95 to 100, and if you are selling 1000 and printing them yourself your selling price would be $14 to 19.

 

[Charles L Webster]

I got the impression from the photos on the poster that each of the posters is a unique piece of work, incorporating shots of one player. Which makes Alan's calculations more difficult.

Someone said they would pay $25 for such. If it were my son, and it was truly unique, I'd want to purchase several copies, and would probably pay $40-60 without flinching.

If they are unique, I would spend the time to create a template into which I could just drop the individual shots, perhaps on individual layers, to make the creation as efficient as possible. Unless you can work for few dollars per hour, you must minimize the preparation time as much as possible.

 

[Asher Kelman]

This is a tough business. Unless one has the sort of event photography that we have seen describe elsewhere on this forum, with multiple viewing stations, point of sale, printing or automatic fulfillment, schools sports and tournaments is a hard hard way to earn a living and if you do not love it, if you aren't into it for what it is, you are going to be very miserable!

It's easy.

There are three possibilities:

1. Professional. You follow Alain's advice, cutting down the per hour to what your name and experience can achieve in your market. Alain is not a casual person happening to do art and sell it on the side. His whole career is dedicated to what he is doing and his wife backs him up and together they have developed a remarkable success story based on training, experience, esthetics, feelings for his subjects (which his part of the name "Briot"), business sense, risk taking, idea of self worth, orgainization, hard work, implementation, building up an image, communication and more!

So forget that $300 per hour and alter accordingly. Double it for me LOL multiply by 5 for others and divide by 2 to three for most other photographers.

2. Semi Professional: This is not your day job!

You however do after-hours professional quality work and expect to be profitable. Here follow my advice earlier in the thread. double the contact hours to account for editing talking on the phone, scouting etc. do plaques and posters yourself if you can, otherwise use a service for fulfillment. Try to get in with the coach!

3. Parent: Here you have great equipment and skill but just your time and some pride in your chest!

Don't get self-deceived! You must make everything appear professional, otherwise you will always be the sucker that is doing a favor!

Make sure you cover expenses. People can think a photo is just a piece of printed paper and they have one at home.

Make a reasonable price. I think at least $24 is in order. Once you have a template, it's easy.

Always carry a poster, a team picture and a book of sample prints in a book. That way you go up a rung in the ladder. A smart business card. Not a smudgy Kinko's version, is a good investment. Website to buy more pics is a great idea.

Good luck!

Asher

 

[Alain Briot]

I got the impression from the photos on the poster that each of the posters is a unique piece of work, incorporating shots of one player. Which makes Alan's calculations more difficult.

Not more difficult. It just makes the poster more expensive. In this case, if you plan to only sell one, very expensive to the point where you cannot reasonably expect to sell it. The nice thing about my approach is that is makes the point very quickly that expecting to make an income from something that takes very long to create and which can only be sold to one individual is not worth it, unless your goal in not financial gain. In that case, if your goal is say " to please people by making something that takes you a long time to create for a very affordable price", then the situation is very different.

It would help if you could tell me what your goal is. Is it to make money or is it to provide a pro-bono service for people that you like?

 

[Charles L Webster]

Alan, I misspoke when I said "more difficult" I meant "more difficult to justify or to make a profit"

I recognize that the methodology of calculating selling price for such items remains the same whether for one item or hundreds, and whether it's based on $10 per hour or $300.

Unfortunately, we don't know if the original poster has ever checked in to read our replies. He has not posted beyond his original inquiry, so we are really speculating here.

 

[Alain Briot]

Alan, I misspoke when I said "more difficult" I meant "more difficult to justify or to make a profit"

I recognize that the methodology of calculating selling price for such items remains the same whether for one item or hundreds, and whether it's based on $10 per hour or $300.

Unfortunately, we don't know if the original poster has ever checked in to read our replies. He has not posted beyond his original inquiry, so we are really speculating here.

A lot of photographers assume that there is a "magic" price for items to be sold at and to make a profit. Fact is, there is no such thing. What there are is a set of specific conditions and circumstances in which a product is created and offered.

This is usually the misunderstanding behind questions such as the one at the start of this thread, and this is why I responded by explaining what I think is the proper pricing approach. This approach is motivated by the desire to make a profit.

It is no different than walking into a store, seeing a poster selling for $9.95, and thinking "that's it, this is what I need to sell my poster for because this is what other people area selling theirs for". The problem with this approach is that you have no idea what the vendor paid for creating the poster in the store. You also may not know yet how much it will cost you to create your own poster.

In my view following this approach often results in the photographer losing money.

 

[Charles L Webster]

A lot of photographers assume that there is a "magic" price for items to be sold at and to make a profit. Fact is, there is no such thing. What there are is a set of specific conditions and circumstances in which a product is created and offered.

This is usually the misunderstanding behind questions such as the one at the start of this thread, and this is why I responded by explaining what I think is the proper pricing approach. This approach is motivated by the desire to make a profit.

It is no different than walking into a store, seeing a poster selling for $9.95, and thinking "that's it, this is what I need to sell my poster for because this is what other people area selling theirs for". The problem with this approach is that you have no idea what the vendor paid for creating the poster in the store. You also may not know yet how much it will cost you to create your own poster.

In my view following this approach often results in the photographer losing money.

I agree wholeheartedly and am grateful to have the benefit of your, and others, advice. I do not rely on photography for a living, but I firmly believe that I must follow the same principles toward pricing, licensing, etc. as someone who does.

I appreciate you laying out a clear-cut methodology that can result in profitable picture making.

<Chas>

 

[Ron Mason]

Eugene:

First of all, nice work. To answer your question as a pro phographer a lot of pricing is regional. What I charge may be twice as much as someone in a differnt town or state and both prices might be right on for the market. You could start by looking at local competitiors and seeing what they charge for a simlar product.
You have to factor in your cost of doing business, your time and add a reasonable profit.
For a poster this size using a basic template I'd charge about 60-70 dollars for a poster this size with a single image, for something like this I'd probably charge $85.00.
Since you are doing the whole team I'd probably discount the quantity and take 20% off the top so maybe $65 per item.

Ron

 

[Nill Toulme]

That sounds about right to me. Sorry to be late to the thread. ;-)

Nill
~~
www.toulme.net