In talking to the same friend that inspired the last post, for fun, he challenged me to see how I’d go about contracting out the pages of a graphic novel on a tight budget. I’ve never done that before. I have no idea how the graphic novel industry works, or even the exact processes, so this is all pure guesswork as to the specifics.

BUT! This is a good opportunity to demonstrate how I negotiate with my artists. I’ve become pretty good at getting them to agree to lower rates than most people could ever get out of them, while still paying fairly and ensuring them a high volume of very satisfying work.

Remember — negotiation isn’t about screwing the other guy, it’s about getting the best possible deal for everybody. I want my artists to be happy! Happy artists make better work.

So, since my friend threw down this little gauntlet, and partly for the hell of it, I came up with a little scenario to show how I negotiate low rates with my artists.

Step 1) Find a hungry artist.

First of all, some of my favorite artists to find when I have a low budget to work with are students and young kids looking for a break. They’re smart, they’re talented, but they’re very green, they need a break, and they’re willing to work for cheap to get the experience they need.

That’s great! I get what I need, they get what they need. And they’re often willing to work harder than some professionals because they have so much more to prove. They’re also more of a blank slate so I can help mold them into more effective artists and I won’t collide with any inconvenient preconceptions that older artists may be saddled with.

I find people like this on art forums like CGTalk and polycount more often than not. It takes a bit of digging and it’s pretty hard to find the really good ones sometimes, but it’s always worth it when you snag a good one. :)

Step 2) Give him a nibble, and a hint of more.

Second, I never tackle a big ol’ massive project all at once… I take it in stages. I could commission the art for a graphic novel including the cover, the roughs, the inking, the coloring and the lettering all for one big price, or a bunch of small ones, but why do that when you can do it in stages?

The more discrete stages you break it into, the easier it is to whittle down the price to its optimal level at each stage. You can do it that way in a way that’s practically impossible if you look at it as a large, irreducible whole. Break it down!

Note: These numbers are totally fictional, although I’m pretty sure I could get them if I tried. :)

A graphic novel is a book. The first piece I can think of to break down would be a cover. Simple. Covers are pretty complex, generally, to be as eye-catching as possible. This will be fairly expensive.

Let’s say we’ll find a contract artist and find out his basic rates. He asks for $400. You explain the work as being something closer to a $300 piece, present compelling evidence and verbally minimize the amount of work it’ll be to him and maximize the amount of fun it is. You present a good case, he agrees and you convince him. So he lowers his price.

As far as he knows, this is a one-off, with a vague notion of more work, but nothing explicitly stated and no promises. It all hinges on the quality of his work and how well you two get along. He’ll be willing to go down in price a little if he thinks he may win more work from you. After all, what’s it matter if he gives up $100 now for thousands later?

Once the cover is done and you’re happy with it (and you weren’t a dick of a client), you’re totally excited. You have a cover. You know you need the rest of the book, but he may only be dimly aware. Now’s the time to give him more.

Step 3) Give him another bite that openly implies even more.

So you start talking to him a bit about the graphic novel and how you’d like to send him more work, since he did such a good job. He earned it. He did very well, he proved himself to you, and you’d like to give him more fun work like that, and more money!

So this next bit of work is simpler: the initial pages of the novel. And hey, he’s a young aspiring artist, and maybe he’s always WANTED to do a graphic novel. Look at what you’re doing for him! Giving him a chance, paying him for his work, and letting him work on something you already got him excited about. Who wouldn’t want that?

You COULD charge a flat rate per page, but why do that? Break it down some more. A page is not just a page. A page starts with a rough layout, a storyboard of sorts. It shows where characters are, how big what panels are and where, leaves room for the dialog boxes, and sets the basic staging area.

This is somewhat more cerebral work and less of a craftsman’s skill, so pay him accordingly. Don’t drop your offered rate so low from the cover price that it doesn’t seem like it’s worth his while. Let’s explain the nature of the work in such a way that it sounds like he’s doing less than $100 worth of work, then offer him $100 for it. Then you two will talk over the work once it’s done and see where you can cut some costs, based on how simple or difficult he found the work to complete.

The important part here is that the $100 is TENTATIVE. You’re offering him a slightly padded but nonetheless generous initial rate for some spec work. Once it’s done, you guys will talk it over and negotiate the rate that’s fair for everybody. He’ll have the incentive to bring the costs down a little to show you that he’s being fair so you’ll keep sending him work!

Step 4) Break down each stage to find cost efficiencies.

Once he finishes a few of those pages at $100 per, take a look at them. If you’re in a typical graphic novel, for example, you’ll have periods of action, and periods of dialogue. The action sequences will most likely be more difficult to draw and stage, whereas the dialogue is just a bunch of talking heads over and over.

Thinking about it further, you could actually even copy and paste heads from panel to panel and change them just slightly, so you can save time and money. Suggest that to him as a way to save his time and your money. Fair is fair, right? Less work for him, less cost to you. Who wouldn’t want to be fair when the suggestion of a high volume of work is in play?

Once you two agree that, yes, you could do that to save time and money, that breaks down your average page into two types of page: Action Pages and Dialogue Pages. That sounds like a reason to charge two different rates, no?

Let’s assume that for every one Action Page, there are three Dialogue Pages. Since the Action Pages are even simpler than he thought they were to do, you can drop the rate on those down to $75 per page, and the Dialogue Pages are so heavily copy-pasted that you COULD drop those down to about $25, but in the interest of generosity, you’ll pad that up to $37.50.

Sure, it’s a little more money, and it’s a rational number because it’s half of $75. Why is it rational? Because (to you) it seems like half the work. It may be even less than half of the work. That doesn’t matter. It’s practically impossible to fairly divide something into fractions of effort, because effort can’t be measured.

This appearance of rationality is extremely important. If the price directly reflects the perceived workload (half the work, half the pay) it makes more sense. If he thinks it’s even LESS than half the work, he’ll be even more inclined to accept that rate. As long as he doesn’t feel like he’s fleecing you, he won’t call that to attention. Let it go, and don’t let him feel like you’re nickel and diming him to death.

So! At those rates, whereas four pages would have cost $400 for roughs, now they’ll cost $187.50. You just saved $212.50 because you broke it down and are smart. You’re getting a better deal, and he feels that not only has he been fair and done a good job negotiating with you, but he feels like you’re being generous with the amount of work it’s taking him. Good job!

Step 5) Treat each stage as its own unique process with its own unique rates.

Once a page is roughed out, it needs to be inked. Do the same thing again here. Make it clear that you don’t want an excessive amount of inking and that you’d like to stick fairly close to the roughs without getting too crazy overboard. Pad the price back up again and stay away from relating to the other numbers you negotiated down.

Why? Because inking is a totally different process than roughing it out and it should be priced uniquely!

Don’t immediately start a trend of driving him down, or reminding him of similar levels of difficult work that will carry over to this new stage. It is a brand new stage, different from the last, and the initial rate you’re offering is based on a generous estimation of the amount of work involved, and NOT the lower rate you negotiated before. Offer $100 per inked page, and don’t differentiate (yet) between Action Pages and Dialogue Pages.

Once he’s done with that, you find out that inking Action Pages is actually easier than Dialogue Pages because since everything on an Action Page is so fast, the details can be more blocky. However, on Dialogue Pages, since everyone’s sitting still, capturing the subtleties of facial features is more important, so THAT’S the real time sink at the inking stage. Pay him $70 per Dialogue Page and $50 per Action Page. (Don’t drop the price by too great a percentage or he’ll feel like he’s getting squeezed too hard.)

At this stage, inking four pages (one Action, three Dialogue) would have cost $400 at your initial, un-negotiated rates. Now it’ll only cost $260, for a savings of $140.

Step 6) Respect and understand the hardest part of the process, and offer to make it easier.

Let’s say the next stage is the coloring. Coloring is going to be pretty tricky and time-consuming, so be nice and bump up the price to $150 per page. But make it clear that you’d like to be somewhat minimalist on the colors where possible, to make it easier on him, and because you’re not terribly picky. Be nice and understanding and easy to work with.

After all, you’re working together, having fun and doing cool stuff. You’re not trying to bleed him dry and pay him peanuts. That’s not a good working relationship! Work together and trust each other to be fair to the other.

So colors are done. Coloring ends up being pretty time-consuming, but that idea you had about being minimal on the colors really saved him a lot of time, so a reasonable rate for that would be a round $100. There’s no real difference between coloring an Action Page or a Dialogue Page, so those pages’ prices are the same.

Four pages at $150 per page is $600, but at your specially negotiated coloring rates, it’s only $400, for a savings of $200! Good job!

Step 7) Spread the cost around to avoid rate increases.

Finally, we get to lettering. Think about it and explain it as being a very simple but necessary thing, and be willing to pay a low (but not insulting) amount of money for it. After all, YOU wrote the book, and he’s simply placing what you wrote. Nothing overly complicated! Should be a snap. Let’s say $50 per page, and see how it goes.

Dialogue Pages are obvious heavy on lettering, and the lettering can really be a bitch. But Action Pages are (obviously) extremely light on dialogue. Some pages are so heavy on dialogue that they may even drive the price upwards to $75 per page. But here, it’s vitally important to explain that you understand that increased workload, BUT with the amount of Action Pages that are in it that he doesn’t have to work on, the $50 per page rate is a pretty reasonable rate since it all evens out in the end. He’ll get a few really easy ones, and a few tricky ones. That’s fair, right?

Doing lettering for four pages at $50 is $200, and by cleverly negotiating a way to ‘even out’ the workload, you saved yourself from a $25 per page rate bump, for a savings of $100!

At the end of the day, if you hadn’t been smart, four pages would have been $1700!! But, since you negotiated smartly, made him a part of the process, and came to understand it better yourself, the two of you worked out a very fair and equitable deal. Now you get four pages for $1047.50, for a total savings of $652.50.

If you broke it down to a per-page average, each page would be $261.87 instead of $425. :)

If your graphic novel was 200 pages long, you’d be paying $52,374 for it instead of $85,000, for a total savings of $32,626. Finding little ways to save on contractors can save you an incredible amount of money in the long run. It’s worth the time it takes to do it, and you develop a better relationship with your contractors by being patient, fair and understanding. On that count alone, it’s worth every second it takes.

And that brings me to the final step.

Step 8) Over time, lock it back into a flat rate.

One final thing I often do that also saves money and prevents resentment toward perceived nickel-and-diming is that, once they’ve completed a portion of the work at the extremely specific rates you set up, re-lump those sums together into one flat rate. Offer him $260 per page for X number of pages.

I do this for many reasons. First, it’s FAR easier to itemize on a contract. Second, he KNOWS where those numbers came from, because he worked with me to negotiate them! Third, it provides for a very reasonable balance of leeway for extremely easy pages and extremely difficult pages without requiring even more extensive cost breakdowns and renegotiation of rates.

The way I see it is that you shouldn’t have to keep breaking everything down endlessly for a long-term contract if it’s all really more or less the same in the end. Just lock down the numbers once you break the rates down to reach the low level you want, and enjoy the long-term contract. :)

So, that’s how I generally do it, and it’s served me well. Any questions? :)

I was giving a friend of mine advice on how to really capture the imagination and interest of a contractor and (hopefully) negotiate a lower rate, and I broke it down in a way that may be helpful to selling your ideas to someone. I’ve broken my method down into a simple three-step process.

Let’s say you have a painting you want to have made, and you have a basic idea of what you want in it and where, but there are other elements you’re not so clear on. You want to bring in an artist that’s smart and effective and will leave his mark on your work and make it better. If you didn’t want to give someone room to use their skill, you’d do it yourself. :) The first step is

1) Infect them with your passion.

So far the best way I’ve found to bring someone on board something and get the best results is to really sell them on the concept. Get a sense of the work they have in their portfolio and how it’s similar to what you want. Give them a basic idea of your project \ book \ story \ character \ whatever, and make it sound gripping, captivating and exciting, and show the passion you have for it.

Don’t go into meaningless detail on this or that, and avoid being clinical at all costs. You can be specific while still leaving things artfully open-ended, and tap into common and easily communicated themes and concepts that tend to get people amped up and excited. Make it sound totally unique and different from anything they ever could have worked on before.

Passion is highly contagious. Creative people are especially prone to contracting it. :)

Once they’re hooked, I move onto the next step, which is

2) Define what you want.

Now that they’re excited about it, explain exactly what it is you want them to do. Take what solid, concrete ideas you have, and communicate the essence of the concept as simply as you can. This should be in fairly broad strokes, so leave out the number of wrinkles in the face or the color of his clothes if it’s not vitally important.

Paint a reasonably detailed mental picture that still has blanks to be filled in. But when you explain it, make it clear that your ideas are fairly well developed and that there is a particular look that you’re going for, and that he shouldn’t stray too much.

But it’s important to leave some parts of the image deliberately fuzzy, to give them some extra room to work with. Which leads me to the final step:

3) Give them a playground.

Once you have them really psyched up about the idea and the work, and you’ve laid down the ground rules and let them know where to tread lightly, take what fuzzy and undefined parts of the concept you want created and talk them up even more. Take an example of some of their other work, or something you think (or know) they love that suits your purposes, show it to them and say something like “I REALLY like what you did in [url to image] and [url to image], and I think it’d be really cool if you could go in a direction like that with the background. I trust your judgment for cool stuff like that, so go crazy! I’m really excited to see what you come up with! :)”

The point is not to lay down so many creative constraints that they feel choked off or stifled. And, conversely, to take the areas that you KNOW are undeveloped and make them sound mysterious and exciting, and make them WANT to fill them out and infuse them with their creativity.

I find that if I don’t make the areas I haven’t got a clear idea of sound interesting, it ends up sounding boring and undefined and I’ve essentially given them no incentive to even try to make it interesting. And, naturally, their creativity finds an outlet in areas I don’t want them to get too creative on.

If I give them a very clearly defined area in which to be creative, they’ll go nuts with that and make something really fun and interesting, and deliver on the core concept I gave them.

That’s one of the more interesting lessons I’ve learned in the past few months. If you just give someone a sense of your passion and excitement about the work you’re giving them, lay down a few ground rules and then give them a little playground to play in, you can get some pretty tremendous results that you wouldn’t have gotten if you’d been too specific or too vague.

By doing it this way, I’ve had phenomenal luck negotiating lower rates and longer contracts out of some mindblowingly talented and hard-to-get artists simply because I got them to care about what they did and let them have fun doing it. :)

The project I’m on is a small-scale MMORPG. As is typical in this type of game, your character is always on the hunt for newer, better pieces of armor. That requires a significant investment in creating new art assets for these armor pieces. There has to be a lot of them, they have to be varied, and they have to look cool. They also have to visually represent different levels of quality. i.e., common armor, special magic armor, and super rare awesome hard-to-find mythic armor.

The problem is — how do you keep track of that many assets? How can I show them off and make sure the visual progression makes sense and that each fits the game’s art style and color palette?

I struggled with that for awhile and one of NCsoft’s head art people worldwide showed me the character tree. It’s a giant table full of characters, each character occupying a single cell of the table. Here’s a mockup very similar to what I use:

Horizontally, the tree is divided into sections by the player’s class: Mage Armor, Ranger Armor, and Fighter Armor. Underneath that are class-specific armor types. i.e., Light Cloth and Heavy Cloth for the Mage, Light Leather and Heavy Leather for the Ranger, etc.

Vertically, it’s divided by the quality level of the armor: Normal Armor, Unique Armor and Mythic Armor. The lower you go on the list, the higher the quality the armor is.

It’s further divided up into yellow and blue cells. The yellow cells indicate an armor set that’s complete. The blue cell indicates an armor set that’s still in production and not yet complete.

When I put the characters on the tree, I place them visually where I think they belong in terms of armor quality. If one piece of armor looks dramatically better than another, then I’ll move it further down the table and leave gaps in between them. Seeing those gaps shows me visually where the progression of low quality armor to high quality of armor breaks down. That way I can know where to start concepting a new armor set to fit in and maintain that logical progression.

I have a five foot by five foot printout of this character tree on my wall. I refer to it constantly, put Post-Its all over it to give me notes, and I have a special template that I can paste new armor sets onto, print out, and cut out to paste individually into cells instead of replacing entire sheets simply because I updated one asset. :)

The biggest benefit of this character tree is to be able to see at a glance how many armor pieces are in the game, how many are completed, and how many are still in production. I can see how the different pieces of armor relate to each other visually, I can see what the name of that asset is, and I can rearrange it easily.

Seeing the entire series of character armor sets in the game was tremendously valuable and has helped me plan art production more effectively and keep track of things like never before. Having it ALWAYS on my wall instead of in pure digital form has been vital. It’s also helped me realize some mistakes I made in other areas.

One of the initial mistakes I made on the project was choosing exactly which armor set was what quality at the outset of production, and naming it that way. i.e.:

Human Male - Mythic Leather Armor 2

All the filenames would reflect that:

Human Male - Mythic Leather Armor 2 Helm
Human Male - Mythic Leather Armor 2 Boots
Human Male - Mythic Leather Armor 2 Body
Human Male - Mythic Leather Armor 2 Shoulders
Human Male - Mythic Leather Armor 2 Gloves

But if I place that asset on the tree, and it looks more Unique than Mythic, and I decide to move it, I have to rename it. You can’t call a Unique piece of armor Mythic! It gets confusing, and creates two names where there was previously only one. In the game it may be Human Male - Unique Leather Armor 4, but all the data still points to files that refer to Human Male - Mythic Leather Armor 2. That requires renaming the MAX file, renaming all the textures, renaming all the materials, re-exporting the model, then going through all the multiple data files and renaming everything and testing to see if it all still works. It’s HUGE pain in the ass.

I didn’t realize it was a problem until I started moving characters around on the tree and they took on drastically different roles than they were originally intended, even though they were called something else using the same terminology. So, in the interest of flexibility, I started naming the armor sets generic names like Cloth 1, Leather 2, Plate 3, etc. That way, the designation of quality (Normal, Unique, Mythic) is totally stripped from it and it can be shifted around easily. The filenames are also shorter, take less time to type in and are less confusing overall.

I never would have realized that if I didn’t have a way of visualizing all our characters and quickly rearranging them! Once you put them all together, the difference is incredible.

Other things I have added or will soon add to the character tree is a text readout of how many characters there are, how many are finished, and how many are still in production, how many color variations exist, and so on. I’ll also have small color-coded tabs on each piece to show what color variations exist for that piece of armor. There’s no reason to waste 10 cells on a single character in red, blue, green, purple, etc, when I can show the normal version and have small color swatches tell me exactly that while taking up less space. :)

I also have a version of the character tree for creatures, which organizes them by race (Orok, Mutant, Fade, Whisker, etc) and role (Melee, Ranged, Caster and Boss). It makes coming up with new monsters incredibly easy when you see one race missing a mage, or a giant bruiser!

I’m also going to develop the same type of visual progression for all our weapons. These constructs have been immensely valuable to me in doing my job better, and I’m still refining them.

Does anyone else work with data like this? If so, what other types of meaningful information might I include on these trees to help me direct better?

Here’s a peek into what I do day to day and the things I’m learning, from broad concepts to specific ideas. I don’t know how informative it’ll be, but I’d like to document it anyway.

I currently lead a team of 11 remote contractors, down from a peak of 14. Sorting out the data they send me is starting to get pretty tricky. The way I’ve BEEN doing it is by organizing them with a directory structure like this:

Bob Contractor
- submission01 (unique male leather armor 1)
- changes (helm modification)
- submission02 (unique male leather armor 1 fixes)
- submission03 (unique female leather armor 1)

The ‘changes’ directory is where I modify the file myself, save it, and send it to the contractor. I put it in a separate directory so I can better sort through the files I save myself, and the files the contractor sends me.

The main problem with the way I’ve set it up is that I get SO many separate directories under each contractor. I’m up to ’submission30′ for one of my artists, and the sheer amount of files is overwhelming. Files can get mixed up sometimes and it’s hard to tell what the latest version of something is.

An idea I’m toying with right now is custom naming every file with a date prefix and dumping it all into one large directory. So it’ll look more like this:

Bob Contractor
(01-19-2007) File 1.max
(01-19-2007) File 1.tga
(01-19-2007 JJ) File 1 changes.max
(01-20-2007) File 1 fixes.max

It’ll all be in one directory, sorted alphabetically AND by date because of the filenames I gave them. Files I’ve sent back for changes have the ‘JJ’ flag, because those are the initials of my name. When I approve an asset, I already have to resave and rename the files and move them to the project directory, so giving them different filenames here prevents me from accidentally assigning textures to the model outside of the project directory (which gets ugly in the game). It fits in pretty well with my existing workflow, while also giving me a quick at-a-glance view of every contractor’s assets and the last time I received a submitted asset from them.

All I have to do to maintain it is, when I receive an asset submission, add the date onto the filename as I save the file to my hard drive (which I already do anyway, so it’s not an extra step).

I don’t know if this is the best way to do things, but it’s the best idea I have right now and I’m moving forward with it until I get a better idea. :) Any thoughts or suggestions would be welcome.

[UPDATE] I talked to some more people about it and the most stupidly obvious answer eluded me — set up an FTP account, give my artists some basic file naming convention directions, and let THEM do it. No more sorting through old assets, no needing to rename everything… just let THEM take care of it. Problem solved! Can’t believe I didn’t think of it sooner, but I’m glad I asked around. :) [/UPDATE]