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On Design: Hiring a Commercial Artist
This is a quick How-To to hire an artist for book design and illustration.
This is broken down into two parts: The Easy Way and The Correct Way.
THE EASY WAY
The Way
The easy way is to go to one of those discount contractor websites that promise you work for under $20. You can find a talented artist who can produce work for your project you may be happy with.Benefits of Easy
- The benefits are that the price is cheap up front.
- …and that’s it.
Detriments of Easy
As in everything Easy, there is a hidden cost. If you are lucky, you will never incur these costs. If you are unlucky – they can cost you everything. And by that, I literally mean everything.You see, book cover art takes anywhere from 4-400 hours to produce. So how are these artists able to produce it for $5?
Here’s How
- The artist lives in a country where wages are low. This doen’t mean they aren’t talented. They can be incredibly talented.
- They won’t spend as much time as they should.
- They may not read your text – and may only follow instructions (off the cliff).
- They may not consider your audience and produce something attractive that is a technical failure.
- They will absolutely not do any market review.
- Lastly, they will steal art to make your art. Meaning – it will be illegal for you to use it. If you get caught by someone who cares, you can be legally responsible for damages plus penalties that could include losing the copyright of YOUR work to the person you stole from.
About legalities. Every country has their own copyright laws that differ. International Copyright laws are…a mess and usually unenforceable. However, in every law I am aware of – the artist is not responsible for any theft. Their client is – which means you. Furthermore, while the designer may be in different country from you – if whom they stole from IS in the same country as you, you will considered criminal, not merely negligent.
Things that are usually copyrighted that you MUST pay for:
- Any and all images (paintings/photos) used in your cover. This means if the artist used any images (paintings/photos) for your cover, the original artist/photographer of every single image must be paid. In a court of law, a judge will decide how much each image contributed to the final work to award damages. There is some lenience here. Images that have been manipulated beyond the original artist’s intent can be considered new works of art…but the burden of proof lies with the infringer – not the claimant.
- Any and all likeness rights used in your cover. If a photo or likeness of an actual human being is used on your cover – that person must be paid. Pro Photographers pay their models and get them to sign a release form to use their image. However, that release form is exclusive to THAT PHOTOGRAPHER. If an artist steals that photo and uses it, the model did not legally release it into your control and your are responsible for damages. This is different than mere copyright. A likeness right is much more serious.
- Design elements (e.g., clip art). It can take hours to create a design element to use. One of the ways to cheat is to use ready-made artwork instead. There are websites all over that offer “FREE CLIP ART” or “FREE VECTOR ART” or even “FREE PHOTOS”… but they are not free at all. If you read the website, they specifically say that they are free to use “for personal use only” and not for publication or profit use in any way. You must pay for the license (or copyright) to be used on your cover. The weird thing is that some of those licenses cost under $50… so when you see an artist charging $5, every single red flag in your arsenal should go up. Additionally, some of these “FREE ART” websites actually use lawsuits as their business model. They will let people download full versions of their art, just so they can sue you later for more than they could have ever sold the art for in the first place.
- Fonts. Everything I said about about ready-made art stands true for Fonts. There are no such thing as FREE FONTS for publication. You must pay for the license to use it on your book cover. Some fonts pub licenses are only $15 and some are $450. Again, how did the artist afford to charge you only so little?
The more successful your book, and the more awareness it generates, the more likely any theft will come to to the copyright owner’s attention. This is how the lie that “it’s all above board” perpetuates. Not enough people get caught because they don’t earn enough. But if you intend on becoming famous and a millionaire on your writing, they will come out of the woodwork for their pound of flesh.
I cannot stop you from doing it the Easy Way – but now you aware of the risks.
THE CORRECT WAY
The Way
You will need a graphic designer. If you only hire an illustrator, you will have to do the graphic design yourself or pay them to do it, and they may not know how (Really. Illustrators and Graphic Designers undergo different training.)<div>Commercial artists get paid by a factor of their efforts, their experience, and the number of eyeballs that see the project. A simple project seen by millions of customers cost the same as complicated project seen by a niche audience. This is not arbitrary. The Graphic Artist Guild publishes a book called “Pricing & Ethical Guidelines” (https://www.amazon.com/Graphic-Artists-Handbook-Pricing-Guidelines/dp/0932102166) that aggregates the national average of commercial art projects and lists them out, along with all of the extra factors involved, to come uop with a fair price for every project. Low end of a budget is $200-$250 for a self-pub, indy book. High end for an indy self-pub can go up to $4,000-$5,000. High end pricing includes both the designer and illustrator. The low-end is just a designer.
Major Publishers High end is $10,000-$13,000 – with Illustrator’s earning around $2,000-$3,000 and the rest goes into studio costs to pay for their internal design team, studio costs, and review process.
<em style=”background-color: transparent; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit;”>Step-by-Step Process
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- Set aside a budget +/-25% for your entire book cover. (e.g., $200 but flexible between $150-$250)
- Understand your customer. Write that down.
- Understand your category and competition. Write that down.
- If you don’t already have one, write a pitch and treatment of your story.
- Write down all of your personal preferences, with the understanding that those preferences may be invalid in relation to your customer.
- Collect all the technical details (PDF, links, etc.) from your printer/epub site.
- Google “Graphic Designer” and the name of your favorite city. You will find a ton of them. Almost every one of them had professional training and knows what to do.
- Provide everything to them: Budget, customer, category, pitch, treatment, preferences, tech specs, etc. to
- Negotiate. No price is set – but you must begin with a budget. Do not ask the artist their rates, because they MUST tell you there highest rates. Tell them your budget and ask if they can work with that. They may not be affordable or they may have a day job and say they can take your project on the side for beer money. If you can’t work something out, ask if they recommend someone who might be able to take it.
- Be prepared to sign 1-2 contracts. One is called a Non-Disclosure Agreement, which says the artist won’t disclose information about your project even if they don’t work on the project. The other is the formal contract for work. I will discuss this in detail in another post.
- Most importantly: MANAGE THE PROJECT – NOT THE ART. By this, I mean that you are hiring a professional to take your information and create the best possible artwork base on that for your project. Arguing their execution will fail because, if you are reading this, you have no experience to actually make those judgements, and your lack of trust will undermine your professional and they will lose motivation to finish it well. Instead, change the information you project them. REAL WORLD EXAMPLE: A client hired me to create color illustrations of children playing in a park. The audience was supposed to be families. Upon review, the client revealed that they dislike the color green without explanation. This detail should have been provided up front. REAL WORLD EXAMPLE #2: Graphic Design Theory is different for men and women. If you are a woman and you declare that your customers are men, you will get Graphics Designed for men – and if they don’t appeal to you and you don’t want to use it, that does not make the design invalid. It means that your criteria was invalid. If you do not want a design exclusively for men, then declare your customers to be both men and women. This actually applies to every possible demographic or combination thereof.
- If you work with an Illustrator as well as a Graphic Designer, let the Graphic Designer provide the cover template for the Illustrator to use, finish the illustration, and then give it all back to the Graphic Designer to apply fonts and elements onto.
- Work in such a way that you and the graphic designer can part ways early if you do not work well together. Be fair and honest. That is often managed in a contract as milestone-based payments.
- Manage your deadline. Your artists can only work with the information you have provided them. If they are waiting on you for information (e.g., clarification, documents, etc.) then missed deadlines fall on you. Be a squeaky wheel when it comes to their deadlines. If they said they will provided something by Friday, check in once before them for a progress update.
- Pay on time. Credit your designer and illustrator. Share their names, URLs, and reputation, on your marketing channels. Let them promote your project (when applicable) on their own channels.
Benefits of Correct
- Your project will have been planned from the beginning for success.
- If something doesn’t work for some reason, you have the know every decision that went into the plan to see where it went wrong and to fix it (e.g., if you expected only men to read the book, but find women enjoy it even though the cover wasn’t designed to attract them, you should probably change the cover to reflect the new audience and improve sales from those customers)
- You will own everything legally.
Detriments of Correct
It’s neither cheap or easy.</div></div> -
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