Originally Posted by
Kellerica
Yes, I'll second Turambar's comment. It ultimately boils down to estimating how long a map will take you, setting some baseline for an hourly rate and charging accordingly. I've been doing commissions for more years than I care to admit, and I basically only worked out my more or less definitive rates this spring, so... it can be a bit of a nightmare even when you've been doing commissions for a while.
I'd imagine many others here could relate when I say that I did my first commissions for way, way too low, because when you are in the beginning it is just that hard to estimate how long something takes you. You simply lack the practiced routine of it that only comes with time, and as a beginner you often are scared of chasing people away if the price is too high, so you're that much more likely to lowball your offer in order to play it safe. Sometimes the only way to learn that lesson is to quote a price, agree to the project, and then finish said project two weeks later than you thought you would with your drawing hand absolutely killing you at midnight ranting "I'm NOT getting paid enough for this, this is so not worth it" to yourself over and over again. Not that that's... you know, a personal anecdote or anything.
One thing I wish someone had told me when I started out, though: your mileage may vary, but when making a map commission, the thing that I will usually spend a surprisingly large amount of time is not actually drawing the map, it is the back and forth with the client when they are trying to communicate what they actually want from the map. Some of them come to you with a very clear vision, some have no idea whatsoever what the final product needs to look like. So when trying to estimate the time it would take to complete any commission, these days I factor in a good few extra hours just for email communication. Because there will be a lot of it. These days I insist on making a really detailed rough sketch, much more detailed than I did in the beginning, so as much of the "That mountain range should actually be more to the left, plus there needs to be a big pass in the middle of it" can be worked out before I start actually spending a lot of time carefully drawing everything in (because boy is it a pain to spend two hours painstakingly drawing a thing only for the client to then turn around and say they actually want it removed completely). But no matter how well I try to plan, there is always something the client will want tweaked this way or that, and my aim is to always create a map they can be happy with, so I'll do my best to comply. But all of that takes time, and that time gets factored into the project price alongside the map drawing itself.
Edit: One final thing to add, don't be afraid to adjust your prices depending on who you are doing it for. My clientele varies a lot, starting from GM's who want to commission a map for the campaign they're running for their friends, or indie authors looking to self-publish their debut fantasy novel, and ending up with bigger businesses like museums and proper publishing companies, and you can bet I charge the latter end of that spectrum a lot more than the former, because I know for a fact that their yearly income is more than big enough to actually pay their artists fairly. Whereas with the GM's and indie authors I'm more than happy charging something that is above minimum wage, but not massively so, since that is enough to keep food on my table and make the project worth doing.
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