Day in the Life of a Third Party Product Publisher / Providers


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Jon Brazer Enterprises

mcathro wrote:
Art cost. Figure fifty bucks per image. Just plan on it. If you can find a good artist that will work cheaper then use him until he wises up! QUICK!

OMG! So true I laughed loud enough to make my co-workers at my day job wonder what I am doing. Good artists are awesome. Good artists that I can afford are EXTREMELY hard to find. I'm hoping that will change now that I am going more print, but yea. Finding good artists that can with my budget constraints are one of the harder parts of running a company.


DMcCoy1693 wrote:
mcathro wrote:
Art cost. Figure fifty bucks per image. Just plan on it. If you can find a good artist that will work cheaper then use him until he wises up! QUICK!
OMG! So true I laughed loud enough to make my co-workers at my day job wonder what I am doing. Good artists are awesome. Good artists that I can afford are EXTREMELY hard to find. I'm hoping that will change now that I am going more print, but yea. Finding good artists that can with my budget constraints are one of the harder parts of running a company.

Art was the biggest expense for us. Before I was picked up by Alluria, the art was 50-100 a plate, B&W. I just did not have the capitol at the time. Now we have 100 full color original plates just about done. Of course making the money back from that will be painful, but we wanted a product that rivaled the "official" books, in terms of quality and look.

I don't regret the choice, but I am seeing the value of stock art as well.


Our upcoming Tome of Monsters, that we just ordered the first few pieces for, is going to have easily 75+ original pieces of art. It's a really considerable expense but it's simply not worth putting a monster manual out without high quality illustrations - you do a disservice to your customers and your product.


Lyingbastard wrote:
Our upcoming Tome of Monsters, that we just ordered the first few pieces for, is going to have easily 75+ original pieces of art. It's a really considerable expense but it's simply not worth putting a monster manual out without high quality illustrations - you do a disservice to your customers and your product.

And I'm not paying more than $35.00 (most are $25.00) for any single piece of the interior art. You can find good art for less than $50.00 per pop.


The going rate among a lot of fairly skilled artists on DeviantArt is generally around $25 dollars, give or take $10. Of course, price goes up with complexity, but good art can be affordable for sure.


hunter1828 wrote:
And I'm not paying more than $35.00 (most are $25.00) for any single piece of the interior art. You can find good art for less than $50.00 per pop.

$50 for artwork is not really that much for artwork. You can see all my pricing for artwork here. I think you have to find economic used for your artwork so you should be able to use it AT LEAST twice in two completely different types of products. But good artist are worth more than what you pay them.


I have found that you can be extremely successful by saying what you want and what your budget is Publicly, we recently did this on Concept Art and I was flooded with reqrests, and I had 30+ replies with 10 solid canidates

I do this with our patronage projects all the time and was surprised at the level of talent that we have been able to recruit.

Steve.

Dark Archive

Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

I think you guys should strip down to speedo's and oil up. Then wrestle to see who's right on the cost of art.

What? What? why are you all looking at me like that?


My money is on LPjr.


LMPjr007 wrote:
$50 for artwork is not really that much for artwork. You can see all my pricing for artwork here. I think you have to find economic used for your artwork so you should be able to use it AT LEAST twice in two completely different types of products. But good artist are worth more than what you pay them.

Not saying it's too much, just saying that I'm not paying that for anything in this book. And, yes, most artists are worth more than what we can pay right now, but most of the artists working with us are willing to work for the price we can offer them. In fact, several of the artists have actually been bugging me to get them new art orders, which I obliged them with.


Dark_Mistress wrote:

I think you guys should strip down to speedo's and oil up. Then wrestle to see who's right on the cost of art.

What? What? why are you all looking at me like that?

I would have an unfair advantage - namely the glare of light off of my fish-belly white legs would blind everyone for 1d4 rounds...

Paizo Employee Chief Technical Officer

hunter1828 wrote:
Not saying it's too much, just saying that I'm not paying that for anything in this book. And, yes, most artists are worth more than what we can pay right now, but most of the artists working with us are willing to work for the price we can offer them. In fact, several of the artists have actually been bugging me to get them new art orders, which I obliged them with.

Getting creative to fulfill your art needs is a good thing. When we launched Magic: The Gathering, we had to figure out how to come up with more than 300 full-color illos all at once, and we couldn't even come *close* to the market rate for that many full-color pieces. Mostly, we ended up finding a lot of art school students, and we paid them $50 in cash and $50 in stock for each piece (Wizards of the Coast stock was $5 per share then, so they got ten shares per painting.)

Any artist who then held their stock all the way through the Hasbro buyout ended up netting a bit more than $1400 per share, so they ended up earning around $14,300 for each piece. (Plus, they got to sell the original art.)

It's what you call a "win-win."


Vic Wertz wrote:

Any artist who then held their stock all the way through the Hasbro buyout ended up netting a bit more than $1400 per share, so they ended up earning around $14,300 for each piece. (Plus, they got to sell the original art.)

It's what you call a "win-win."

I call that a SUPER Win-Win!

Jon Brazer Enterprises

Vic Wertz wrote:
and we paid them $50 in cash and $50 in stock for each piece

Dang! Awesome idea. Unfortunately, I have to incorporate to use that idea. But otherwise it would be an awesome idea to steal.


This thread is really making me see the need for a publisher that falls in love with my Stickman's Mother piece or my Stickman's Inferno. Anyone?

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