Hi Y’all in the time that I’ve been a part of the Tapas community I’ve seen a lot of unpaid collaboration posts. Y’know the type.
There have been a lot of great recent threads about how to handle these posts, and how to make better collaboration offers. Though I have another suggestion on how we could further improve our tactics for responding to these threads.
First though - let’s talk about fair freelance rates.
This twitter thread that I was reading earlier was filled with great advice about figuring out how much you should be charging for freelance work, and how to ask for that fair rate:
The general consensus is that charging the equivalent to $40/hour, on top of other things such as revision fees, rush fees, and "asshole rates", is what we should consider a fair rate for our work. (This probably changes if you’re not from the US, the thread goes over how to calculate rates that are more specific. In general though, you should never ever ever ever charge LESS than minimum wage.) For the purposes of this discussion we’re going to pretend that the $40/hour rate is accurate and fair for everyone.
Next, let’s consider how long it takes us to finish a comic page. For me, it takes about 5-8 hours from start to finish, I’m not including thumbnailing or writing because I usually do that separately. Keep in mind that this is a very conservative estimate. Let’s just say it takes 5 hours to finish a page, even though we all know that’s just silly.
$40 x 5hr = $200/page, this also happens to be the number that's most frequently thrown around as a standard page rate for comic artists. (IMHO, this standard page rate is really bad, especially if you’re doing the entire page by yourself, unless you’re finishing pages in UNDER 5 hours, in which case, you should probably be charging EVEN MORE for your speedy turn-around. But that’s another discussion.)
If I’m being more honest about how long pages actually take me to finish them, and I estimate on the high end: $40 x 8 = $320/page.
I’m not considering long-scroll format comics here, the go-to approach with these seems to be charging PER PANEL.
Now let’s go back to these unpaid collaboration posts. @Jenny-Toons has done a great writeup about who the people making these posts are:
tldr, they’re not writers, or artists, they’re “visionary thinkers”. And because that, they have no understanding of the artistic process, they don’t really understand anything about what we do or what we’re worth. They’re just looking for someone to make their great idea a reality. Also - a lot of these people are probably kids. More on that later.
Jenny also points out that collaborating with friends, partners, other established creators and community members is a WHOLE different ballpark. I completely agree, I’m not suggesting we start demanding money from each-other for fun little community projects. We’re talking about people from outside the community, who are not established creators, who we do not know, who come in expecting to find someone to work FOR them FOR free.
What we need to do is let these people know how much our work is worth. We need to say: “Hey, I know this is an unpaid collaboration, but just so you know, making 4 full color pages a week is roughly the equivalent to $1300 of work, and that’s a lowball estimate.” - and we need to say this in addition to all of the other great stuff we’ve been saying about the workload that many of us already have, suggestions on how to better seek a collaborative partner, and what we consider to be a true collaboration.
Now - I don’t expect any of these visionary thinkers to actually cough up $1300, and I don’t expect any of us to actually take on one of their projects. But, I still think we should do this because it sets a standard, and it makes the value of our work painfully obvious. Over time, we can build up a reputation that we don’t work for free, and that if ppl want us to make their great idea they’re going to need to pay AT LEAST $200 per page, in addition to being treated as creative partners on the project and getting a revenue share, this needs to become our MINIMUM EXPECTATION as a community, if we negotiate at all, we need to be negotiating for MORE than this, or a pretty darn good equivalent if they're offering a trade.
Eventually, visionary thinkers seeking collaborations in our community will know what they’re really asking for, and be better prepared to fairly compensate us (even if they don’t have the money, they may be able to come up with an offering that’s more valuable than just a revenue share), and just as we’ve seen better worded collaboration posts recently, we may see better paying collaboration posts as well.
In a private discussion with @punkarsenic , they pointed out that most of the visionary thinkers are probably kids. All of this information should be delivered gently with that understanding, and we should furthermore encourage them to start learning to draw themselves.
In addition to this, they point out that we need to stop dog-piling these people. These threads don’t need anymore than 2 people chiming in if someone else is already handling it. When 6+ people come into an unpaid collaboration thread all saying the same thing - it comes off as aggressive, it escalates the situation, and it scares people away from the community (and by that I mean it scares kids away from learning how to draw.
ALL OF THAT SAID - as a community we have come A LONG WAY with how we handle these collaboration threads and better defining our expectations as a community. But I think we can go further. As always - I’m open to hearing everyone else’s take on this. My ultimate goal is to continue contributing to making the tapas community a great, helpful, welcoming place, and to make art sustainably in the process.
Srrsly tho y’all deserve a pat on the back for keeping up with unpaid colab threads.
