Illo Agency - anyone experience signing with them?
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@davidhohn Thanks for the double-check! I'll need to relisten to that one.
As new illustrators, do you think we have a chance of negotiating that percentage down at all? Or are we stuck with what is offered if we want to sign with that agency?
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@davidhohn said in Illo Agency - anyone experience signing with them?:
But it is extremely rare for Illustrator Agents to do this anymore. Promotions are done almost via jpegs and websites. Exactly the same as Literary Agents.
There are a couple exceptions to this. Agents still do shows and book fairs. For which they have to pay the table, travel, printing of samples (for ALL their artists) and banners, etc.
They also have much more elaborate websites than literary agents do. My agency had their website revamped last year with a full CRM to allow artists to upload and manage their own portfolios, make their samples searchable by clients with an algorithm, etc. From what I heard through the grapevine, this website update cost them in the 6 figures!
But 100% agree that the quality of agents' services has actually declined while their fees have gone up. My agent sends me great gigs sometimes, and other times ridiculous ones below a livable wage (work for hire no less) and I'm left wondering why the heck this client is in their network.
Most of the time, they also don't negotiate until and unless I ask for something. They'll be like "This project is $5,000 do you want it?" and I'll be like "That's ridiculous. Please tell them I'll do it for $12,000" and only then they go and ask for that. I've refused everything they sent me in the past 6 months because the quality just wasn't there, so I'm seriously considering just going solo at this point... But since I'm at liberty to refuse anything they send me, there's little to lose by staying on and waiting for those good gigs...
@davidhohn said in Illo Agency - anyone experience signing with them?:
A bit of math:
If you get yourself jobs that pay $1000 then an agent would need to get you that same job for $1550 (at 35% that would net you $1007.50)That's really interesting but not sure I agree 100%. In terms of pure money yes they'd have to find gigs 35% better in order to make up for the 35% commissions fee. But in practice, if we have to spend 20 hours of marketing to find ourselves that gig, that's 20 hours less we can spend on paid work. Our time is money. Any gig that we get through no effort of our own is saving us valuable time that we can spend on our paid gigs, art shops, etc
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@NessIllustration said in Illo Agency - anyone experience signing with them?:
You make good points, and this is a discussion worth digging into.
There are a couple exceptions to this. Agents still do shows and book fairs. For which they have to pay the table, travel, printing of samples (for ALL their artists) and banners, etc.
Thatâs a fair point, but Iâm not yet convinced it justifies the significantly higher (and seemingly ever-rising) illustration agent fee.
Literary agents would be at those same events.
The cost for travel, a table and a banner for lit agent vs an illustration agent is the same. The fee discrepancy doesn't seem justified.Printing of samples.
There is a greater cost to the illustration agent.â¨But honestly â not much. Postcards are pennies per card. At most 25cents. And this is an additional cost was already being absorbed when the agent's percentage was at 25%. Postcard printing costs have gone down not up.They also have much more elaborate websites than literary agents do. My agency had their website revamped last year with a full CRM to allow artists to upload and manage their own portfolios, make their samples searchable by clients with an algorithm, etc. From what I heard through the grapevine, this website update cost them in the 6 figures!
Fair enough. But that needs to be compared to prior costs that no longer exist. Physically shipping portfolios and samples, a significant cost, is basically non existent now. Allowing illustrators to manage their portfolios is actually a cost-savings since the agency does not need a staff person to handle that. And while there is a significant upfront cost to a website redesign, that cost is then divided over the 5 - 8 - 10 years the agency will have the website.
And what weâve seen is that technology (websites) donât get more expensive, they get less as things become more standardized and automated.
[...] I've refused everything they sent me in the past 6 months because the quality just wasn't there, so I'm seriously considering just going solo at this point...
You mention âqualityâ; is that "subject matter" and what youâre being asked to draw or the budgets are too low?
But since I'm at liberty to refuse anything they send me, there's little to lose by staying on and waiting for those good gigs...
The person who can say âNoâ and walk away, holds a significant advantage in a negotiation.
That's really interesting but not sure I agree 100%. In terms of pure money yes they'd have to find gigs 35% better in order to make up for the 35% commissions fee. But in practice, if we have to spend 20 hours of marketing to find ourselves that gig, that's 20 hours less we can spend on paid work. Our time is money. Any gig that we get through no effort of our own is saving us valuable time that we can spend on our paid gigs, art shops, etc
This is a very interesting take.
â¨It makes me wonder what your âwalk awayâ percentage would be?
I mean, if you look at any project you didnât get yourself as a âno-effort projectâ then would you say "Yes" to an illustration agent who asked for 50% or 75%?Not being snarky here. This is a genuine question.
I can see your logic, but feels like a slippery slope.It also assumes that marketing is zero sum. That if you donât get any work from 20 hours worth of marketing effort then that 20 hours is wasted. â¨â¨I would counter that those 20 hours are instead additive. That each hour spent marketing is an hour in which you are closer to the project that would pay for that hour.
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@davidhohn I wholeheartedly agree!
It's a little bit reductive to say all they do is just send jpegs nowadays - there's more to it than that - but I also don't think it justify hiking up the percentage THAT much.
I have been thinking about this sometimes, and my hypothesis is that some of these agents really have some crap clients in their networks (the ones that pay below livable wages). I guess to still earn a good amount of money in commissions while having a substantial amount of those bad clients, maybe that's why they need the commission % to be higher? Not sure, this is just a hypothesis.
@davidhohn said in Illo Agency - anyone experience signing with them?:
You mention âqualityâ; is that "subject matter" and what youâre being asked to draw or the budgets are too low?
I meant that the budgets were too low. Or that the fee would cover only time spent, but the client wanted all copyrights on top of that (without paying additional). I just won't do those on principle
@davidhohn said in Illo Agency - anyone experience signing with them?:
I mean, if you look at any project you didnât get yourself as a âno-effort projectâ then would you say "Yes" to an illustration agent who asked for 50% or 75%?
This is a great question because I'm currently switching markets from picture books to surface design, and since my current agent specializes in publishing I'm considering whether or not to switch to a licensing agent. And surprise: licensing agents take even more than illustration agents do!! It's more in the 40-50% range for licensing agents!
I assume this is because of the large amount of work surface designers create (on average 12 new designs per month). The good agencies will format those designs into sell sheets, mockups and look books for you, send them to buyers monthly, and print them up for shows. Surface design shows like Surtex are infamous for being unbelievably expensive and the agents print up full color 11x7 sheets and look books for buyers to walk away with, so they do have lots of expenses.
But enough to justify 50% commission? That is a hard pill to swallow! I'll have to get a bit more experience in this market to know how hard it is to get clients myself vs. letting an agent find them for me, and whether having an agent is still more financially advantageous than not. I also have to ponder whether I want spend large amounts of time marketing myself, or have more time for drawing instead... That's a serious consideration. Doing everything by myself is cheaper, but not always what I truly want out of my life.
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@NessIllustration I like your view that the energy saved in marketing time is what pays for the worth of an agent's take. @davidhohn your comment about how the agent should be hustling to find you work makes a lot of sense in that context. So happy to be a fly on the wall for this conversation. Commenting just to receive alerts.
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I guess it depends on what you are looking for.
I was with an art agency for about 6 months at the start of my career. I left because I just could not figure out how to make a full-time living financially. The commision fee was 30% , and the kind of gigs I could get via the art agency was just not paying enough. I was working non stop for 6 months, and I was far from making a living. The advantage was that the art agency did provide me a wide range of projects - I had many offers, and I did two books due to the time constrains.
After the 6 months, I switch to a literary agent, and started writing my own picture book. I prefer writing and illustrating my own book, much more than doing illustration only gigs. Currently the commision fee is 15%-20% for my projects. If you are interested in writing your own story, I would recommend seek a literary agency or a hybird agency (the CAT agency for example). Even many art agents help with presenting your dummies to editors, a literay agent is more suitable to rep an author/illustrator, both in terms of industry knowledge, and finance (15% commision vs. 35%).
With artists I met online (most of us are at the begining, or a couple of years into our career), I see there is a tendency that artists who are repped by a literary agency (or hybrid boutique agencies) tend to be happier with their agent than artists who are repped by an art agency. There are always exceptions of course, but so far that is my impression on artists I have chatted with.
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@miranda-hoover I have never heard anyone manage to negotiate the commission percentage. It should be the same for every artist an agency represents. I would be super uncomfortable if an agency offer different commission percentages to different artists without being transparent.
There are other things an artist can negotiate, but I think commission percentage is a difficult one.
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Thanks for the conversation guys! All good points. To be honest I would prefer a literary agency like Xin mentioned. I want to specifically do picture books and I have a couple of my own. But I was with an agency for the last couple of years who took 25% (that's standard), and got me a ton of work yet not what I really wanted to do. Now I have this offer from Illo Agency and I like that they're international. But going from 25% comm to 35% hurts a lot. At teh same time, my old agent was asking for a bunch of extra money to cover advertising costs, and even to be on their website (total BS). these guys don't. So yeah, ideally I'd get my own work without an agent but it seems daunting for some reason. I'm a working mom with limited free time and I do love that the agent does all the work of going after the work for you. But there's the obvious downside of paying commission. So I don't know... Maybe I'll look into more literary agencies before signing with these guys.
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As new illustrators, do you think we have a chance of negotiating that percentage down at all? Or are we stuck with what is offered if we want to sign with that agency?
Been thinking about this.
I'd love to say "Yes you definitely can negotiate the percentage down"But I'm a realist. So I have to qualify that "Yes" a bit.
The reality is that while it is possible to negotiate an illustration agent's (IA's) percentage down from 35% to (say) 25%, I think it's unlikely.
To be clear there's no rule saying that an IA has to charge a certain percentage. No governing body that will overrule them. The contract between you and the IA can be whatever you both agree to.
It comes down to how much the IA wants to work with you.
If they really believe in you and your work and your career they will negotiate to terms you both are happy with. After all the fundamental idea of an agent / illustrator partnership is that you both team up to make money together.
If they don't have that enthusiasm then they will not be willing to negotiate.There's another question that you didn't directly ask but I'd like to address:
Should you try to negotiate with an IA who is asking for 35%-40%?
For sure! As often as you are willing to do so.
Ask them to explain their fee. Ask them to clearly explain what they will do for that fee. How they plan to grow your career? How will they generate the kind of income you need to stay in this career?
Counter their offer. Explain your position. Be willing to find a middle ground that works for both of you.This is especially effective if you already know the negotiations are not likely to work out, because you won't be negotiating from a position of fear.
As was noted in @NessIllustration post above, the person willing to walk away holds considerable power in the negotiation. So you may find yourself in a stronger position that you expected.
But in any case you will have a chance to practice one of the most important conversations you might have in your career. The choice to partner with an agent can be long and fruitful relationship. Knowing what you want and need from a partnership like that can be incredibly beneficial.
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I would be super uncomfortable if an agency offer different commission percentages to different artists without being transparent
This is an interesting position.
Can you explain further?My own take is that this is simply standard in business.
Different people get different deals all the time. It reflects the real (or perceived) value they bring to project or a company.But I'll admit that I haven't thought about this that deeply. Just a "taken for granted" kind of thing.
The idea of transparency is interesting to me as well. What would that potentially look like? -
@davidhohn Very good points! Thank you, I'll keep those in mind!
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@davidhohn
Hmm. good question.
I think it has something to do with a sense of fairness, and trust. It will create a weird dynamic if I discover another artist pays less commission percentage to the same agent I work with without any clear reason. This would not be good for building a long-term partnership.The first art agency I worked together with has a 30% commission rate for every artist they take on. I actually negotiated the rate with them then. I asked if they would willing to go down to 15% commission percentage for author/illustrator books and remain 30% for illustration-only projects. My argument was that 15% was the standard rate a literary agency would take for an author/illustrator book. They were not willing to negotiate that as they prefer to have the same rate for all their artists and did not want to make exceptions for the reason of fairness. I respected that.
I guess people have different perspectives on every aspect of this business. There is no right or wrong way to go about finding an agent, negotiating terms. It comes down to what you are comfortable with.
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@lizbrizzi 35% is wayyyyyy to high you won't be making what you're worth. They'll be taking 35% plus depending on what tax bracket you're in that's like at least 50% cut taken from you with every check.
I checked out your website and your work is great! Your portfolio is strong enough that other agencies will want to work with you.
My agent takes 15% which to me is fair. A 20% cut would be the most I'd give up, we illustrators do so much work for not enough money. -
@Dan-Tavis I so agree with you. I'm just in a weird position because I'm breaking up with my agency. They took 25% which is actually standard for this type of "illustrators only" agent. An author illustrator agent takes 15% I think. Anyway I'm just scared to not have an agent now because they were giving me so much work. My clients still want to work with me, agent or not. So that's good. But it feels weird to be on my own for a while. It might be best to wait for the right agent though, as opposed to signing with whoever makes me an offer first.
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@Dan-Tavis Also, I just checked out your work and just wanted to say I love it! And that you and me both started drawing because of Math class. Haha!