The first question that comes to my mind is: why does she want a cover when she’s not even sure she will publish the book? Seems very weird to me. A cover is a marketing tool - to produce one for a book that is not even finished and where publishing is not even sure seems more in line with a private commission for herself - to see her project come to life for her own personal pleasure.

I don’t think there’s any issue with taking the commission, if you like the brief - I would handle it as a private commission.

@CosmoglotJay Cannot comment for AP, but compared to PS the brush dynamics of ProCreate is better. The newest version is a pretty solid piece of software, with which you can do practically everything you can do in Photoshop (in terms of painting, not photo-editing). Some functionalities are still missing, but overall is a great tool for painting.

@CosmoglotJay Yes, ProCreate is a fabulous app and I don’t think I’d feel the need to change to a different one from painting on the iPad.
Wishing you to get an Apple Pencil for Xmas then!

@CosmoglotJay I’ve been using Affinity Designer on the iPad for a while. It’s a powerful software, no doubt, but I find the workflow very clunky compared to working on a computer. I’m used to dozens of shortcuts on the keyboard and work with one hand on the keyboard and one on the stylus. Not having that slows down the work immensely - in my case it takes at least double the time compared to Adobe Illustrator. I’m sure the computer version is very powerful, though.

@NessIllustration Absolutely! I still hear Will’s words: handle each job as if it was a 30K dollar job, even if you’re only getting 300...Or, as I say to myself: if I take it, I’ll do my best. If I can’t do my best, I won’t take it.
The book industry is based heavily on word-of-mouth and reputation. Illustration is a bit broader, but probably very similar at the end. You need to treat your reputation as your biggest asset.

Definitely, I’d love to hear about resources you’ve found useful for your Etsy shop!

What a beautiful Etsy shop @NessIllustration !!! I’ll put it at the top of my list of inspiration! I’ve been thinking of opening an Etsy shop since a couple of years, but it’s such a lot of work and I never seem to find the time.

I’m rarely on the forum these days (I’m an old SVS alumna), but I wanted to tune in for @xin-li because I’m going to Bologna too in April (like every year), and I’m always happy to meet new faces with shared experiences. If you’d like to meet, just DM me and we can set up a place and time for a coffee and chat.

I work nearly exclusively in book publishing and I can confirm that Bologna is a great source of contacts and contracts both. Most of my work is from return “clients”, and many of them I met at Bologna. That first contact is often the start of a multi-project collaboration, that keeps growing and evolving. If it’s your first time in Bologna, feel free to ask how to “walk the fair”.

To contribute to the topic: I get work from my agent (I’m repped by Transatlantic Literary), book fairs (Bologna mainly - I’ve just started going to Frankfurt this year) and sometimes from Behance. I got my very first book contract from Instagram but I think that it’s a very rare occurrence. I think one contract in a year for a literary agent and a debut illustrator is not bad - it gets more and more when the first books come out and you get a bit of a “name”. The publishing industry moves very slow, book projects take a long time, etc... But once you’re in the door with medium-large publishers, contracts keep coming and keep getting better.

I’ve done my first book in 2016 and now, at the end of 2019, I was in a place where I could quit my day job to do full-time book illustration. Maybe now I’ll have the time to open that Etsy shop!

@peteolczyk said in Business advise needed, reg estimate to illustrate:

I don’t know if I can add much to this thread, but I’ve been told, from various sources, not to give away rights to an illustration. I’ve been given a template of a standard contract which is a five year licence only. I don’t know if anyone can elaborate on this but I’m assuming selling the rights completely would come at an absolute premium.

That’s the theory, but the reality is a lot more complicated. Editorial illustration is normally a rights only, but rights are calculated based on scope of use (digital vs print vs how many copies are distributed) rather than time, or sometimes on both time and scope. In publishing there’s a lot of different rights: foreign rights, merchandising, film and television, etc... and these are normally listed in a contract together with the terms specific to each. That said, those are premium contracts.

Many solid and remunerative jobs are only possible on a “work-for-hire” agreement, where you give up all rights - for example educational publishers almost exclusively work that way: so basically if you insist on a rights-only agreement you’re not an interesting partner for them.

I hear from my agent that many small trade publishers are starting to work the same way, and I’ve been offered those type of contracts for trade as well...

I’m coming in very late on this discussion, though I think all the advice and process you followed is spot on.

When a request comes in asking for a quote and with no details, my experience is that it rarely comes to anything. It’s already a good sign that they followed up, because normally as soon as you respond with all the questions that need to be answered before you can advance an estimate, they never respond.

The wording on the response e-mail suggests that this is a self-publishing author. Even if your research revealed a small publisher, it’s likely that they only publish books by one author, who happens to be the founder
There are a few “publishers” like that - sometimes they actually have a small list and work with different illustrators or maybe two or three authors, but in general the setup here seems to be that of a self-publishing author.

What is not clear from this e-mail is exactly how many illustrations she’s talking about (3 to 5 in total for a 100-page book seems very very weird) and wether she expects you to do the entire book layout? That’s not an illustrator’s job, it’s a book designer’s job. That’s a different skillset and profession, and needs to be priced separately. Or you make it clear that you’re only doing the illustrations and not the book design (which most self-publishing people don’t even realize they need...).

Even after the responses there are still so many questions and red-flags, I would be careful about taking this on at this point, regardless of the budget (which is very low, especially if she expects you to do the book design - but that’s a different discussion...).

An old video by Will Terry (sorry, can’t search for the link right now) said something along the lines that it’s always better for the client to “come out” first with their budget and term proposal (terms refers to both money, payment schedule, royalties vs no royalties and any other consideration relating to money and time).
Following that advice, I’ve always answered to requests like these with a non-committal “it depends”, and asking for their preferred way of working and budget.

I’m sure there are plenty exception, but in my experience it’s always the publisher that advances a proposal anyhow: budget, timelines and manuscript. And then you negotiate on either of the first two (more often on both....).

@Annemieke Twitter can be very confusing. I highly recommend a free Twitter dashboard called TweeDeck - it really helps make sense of the conversations going on. I cannot say I‘m very active on Twitter (it‘s always in my bucket list), but it‘s where most of the publishing world lives, so I‘m always aspiring at making sense of it (though nowadays maybe LinkedIn is taking on a more prominent role than it used to have). Anyhow, I follow #PBChat, #picturebookportfolio, #kidlitart and a few others. On TweetDeck, you can set up any stream and take a look at it. If you like what you see, you keep it, interact or post. If not, you delete it and move on. I cannot make any sense of the standard feed and I never look at it. I only look through the TweetDeck dashboard.