How to Price Photos According to Seth Godin
The difference between blueberries and apples (one bad blueberry spoils the whole bunch).
If you serve yourself blueberries by the handful, you won’t be able to inspect each one. And so just one rotten blueberry can ruin the entire bowl of cereal.
An apple is different. It’s hand picked. Pick the wrong one and it’s not such a big deal, you can just pick another. If you sell apples, then, the goal is to make the great ones great, really great. If you’re in the blueberry business, on the other hand, the goal is to eliminate defects.
An artist who works on matters of personal taste, then, can afford to go to the edges... in fact, she must. Let the buyer choose! Books and paintings and houses are apples. (His words, my emphasis)
The manufacturer of fungible items, on the other hand, embraces six sigma, because recovering from a failure is expensive (and it’s your fault). Sutures are blueberries.
— Seth Godin: http://sethgodin.typepad.com
What's blueberries and apples got to do with the pricing of photos? Actually a lot, because it's very similar. How to set the price of your photos? This is one of the most often asked question that I receive. The pricing dictates the level of service and the customer's expectations.
A $3 4” by 6” print doesn't have have to be perfect and is sold behind a counter. The same photo, sold for $300, needs to presented in a room with the customer sitting in a comfortable chair. The same photo, sold for $3,000, needs to be shown in the customer's home on their wall to make sure that it will match.
It's the same photos, it's completely different levels of service.
Wedding photos? They go from $250 to tens of thousands… The photographers can be just as competent, just as good, but… The $250 wedding photographer gives only 1½ hour of coverage and one photographer. The tens of thousands photographer gives full coverage with a whole team to cover the groom's house, the bride's house, the 20” by 30” metal prints…
- Nowhere do we talk about the expertise of the photographer.
- Nowhere do we talk about the quality of the photos.
It's the service and the presentation that dictates the prices.
That's fine and dandy for the “retail” photographers. What about editorial…?
- The publishing rates are standard rates. If you don't know them, there's fotoquote from Cradock.
- The main problem is your understanding of the bid and what you should quote for.