And she's always screaming and shouting

[austin_dern]

Also during the lull between panels we got the squirrel mini-badge to go around bunny_hugger's puppet Chitter's neck. I'm surprised that given the number of people carrying puppets around there weren't more people getting mini-badges for them, or adding accessories like the scarf she had Chitter wear. The scarf was in part self-defense: the Chitter squirrel she has is a not particularly rare model and tags like this help sort out ownership. Mini-badges would also help.

Another little pastime for me was marvelling at skylerbunny for taking action on something that, actually, he and I had talked about before. See, one of the things we have noticed is that furry artists tend to be impoverished, even beyond the normal levels of impoverishment to be expected for furries or artists or the intersection of those sets. And our quick diagnosis of why is pretty simple: they set commission rates way too low.

Our analysis is that, basically, artists have roughly the same economic niche that consultants have: there are a fair number of clients who could be talked into buying their services, and there's a not irrational fear of having no clients, and this seems to encourage making sure that one is never short of work by setting the rate low enough that you'll never be turned away. And that's fine if all you want is to fill your hours with work. But the first rule a consultant is supposed to learn --- and I say this admitting that neither of us made it in consulting roles, at least so far --- is to figure out how much you want to earn per hour. Then figure out how long a job will take. This tells you where to set your rates.

This perhaps sounds obvious. But I know, for example, that woodlander recently did a little bit of selling commissions for icon work at three dollars per icon. At that rate, he's earning less than minimum wage if the icon takes more than 25 minutes to do. Yes, I know some people want to draw just to draw and are happy making enough to afford their art supplies and maybe lunch, but, there's a lot of people out there under-pricing themselves.

So skylerbunny was exhibiting his desire to put some kind of floor under artist prices by arguing with Skrimpf, a rather talented fellow in Artists' Alley, that he just was not charging enough and should be asking for more and if he wasn't going to ask for more skylerbunny was just going to refuse to buy anything until he charged more. This was a particularly pathological case, as Skrimpf was steadily putting up possible suggested prices about would maybe seven dollars be all right for a three-by-five badge in colored pencil and maybe six would be all right perhaps less if skylerbunny saw it and didn't like how it came out and ... Well, skylerbunny was having none of this.

One of the most popular psychology pieces of the past decade, on the Internet at least, has to be the Dunning-Kruger Effect which indicated that people who were really incompetent at a task vastly overrated their abilities. Skrimpf has whatever the inverse of that effect is, and don't tell me that won't be a popular Internet Psychology Idea for the future: while he's quite skilled and has a distinctive and entertaining style he doesn't seem to believe he's reached even a minimum level of competence. If his prices were about four times what they are, this might be attributed to putting forth a pleasantly humble bit of salesmanship. As it is, I had to fend off his offer of an extra print for free just because I was buying some.

skylerbunny would go on to get a badge which looked very nice and captured his persona in a way not like anyone had done before. The only thing he found to fault in the badge as it turned out was that Skrimpf failed to put his signature on it. I'm not sure how much skylerbunny bid up the price from what Skrimpf was asking, but I know it was something nonzero, and good for him.

Trivia: Reuters's first news scoop came on 10 January 1859, in summarizing a speech the King of Sardinia was giving to the opening of parliament. Oddly, folklore would for decades accept that Reuters's first scoop had come the week before in reporting a speech by Napoleon III on New Year's Day, even though the content had appeared a day earlier in the Times of London. Source: The Power of News: The History of Reuters, Donald Read.

Currently Reading: An ABC Of Science Fiction: Twenty-Six Excursions Into The Fantastic, Editor Tom Boardman Jr. With 26 stories, by authors with last names that go through nearly every letter of the alphabet (X is represented pseudonymously) in 222 pages these are very short things prone to punch-line endings you can see coming from several dozen pages back. Still, Arthur C Clarke, Damon Knight, Chad Oliver, Frederick Pohl, Clifford Simak all bundled together, who's going to find serious fault with that?

Comments

Furry artists may have it worse than most, but the problem shows up in most of the arts

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

Huh. I was just thinking about something similar on the way home from my gig. The event ran from 19:30 to 22:15 (nominally 22:00), and IIRC we're getting something like $80 apiece, which sounds like about $30/hour ... but between getting ready (hey, when non-everyday clothing is explicitly part of the gig, I'm going to count getting-dressed time, whether it's changing into costume on site or digging outgarb at home), travel there (it's a secial trip to a client's location, not a day "in the office"; travel time counts), setup and tuning, playing, packing up again, travel home, and putting my tools away, the portion of my day when I was doing nothing else but work related to this gig was 18:00 to 23:55. Which makes it closer to $13-$14 per hour.

I'm not going to count the "homwork" of arrangng my sheet music into set-list order and copying chords onto index cards for the tunes I didn't already have chord cards for (this gig was mostly not our usual repertoire), though maybe I should. Likewise for solo practice tie ("woodshedding"). Counting time spent specifically on reading and answering email related to this gig might be pushing it. But because this was not our standard repertoire, there's more data ...

It's usually difficult to meaningfully divvy up rehearsal time according to which gig it should count for, but the different music makes it easy to sa which rehearsals were For This Gig. I made it to two rehearsals specifically for tonight, and there was at least one more that I missed. I probably shouldn't count driving to rehearsals, since those count as "in the primary workplace" events even though we usually hold rehearsals in a different band member's house each time (though in terms of how much of My Life I'm spending on this, driving to rehearsals is still time spent, "commuting" isn't usually included in the $/hour math), and I was late to one of 'em, so let's say 3:40 of rehearsal instead of the full four hours. So now we're up to nine and a half hours, at about eight and a half dollars an hour, and only as high as that because I missed rehearsal time that the money would otherwise be divided farther by.

Suddenly, $80 for an evenings playing really doesn't sound like a whole lot of money (and I haven't counted mileage expenses yet). But from the client's point of view, they're only paying for an evening worth of service, with all the rehearsal/prep tie being invisible to them, so $80/musician probably feels like they're paying us handsomely for our music.

This may explain the bumper sticker we've seen that says, "Real musicians have day jobs".


At one point when I was having trouble paying for gasoline (well, more trouble than usual), I added up what it cost me in gasoline alone to get to rehearsals and back, and worked out how any gigs a month we had to average in order for me to break even on fuel costs alone.


How many jewelers and other crafters price their work based on "a reasonable amount" over the cost of their materials, completely forgetting to pay themselves even a low-side-of-reasonable wage for their labour? How many of their customers would flinch if they saw a price tag that really reflected the labour?

Re: Furry artists may have it worse than most, but the problem shows up in most of the arts

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, now, musicians have it really awful and I probably should've thought of that as a point of comparison before. The drain of rate-of-pay to the time it takes setting up and testing equipment, not to mention travel time [1], or rehearsal or general practice ... well, it leaves me a little glad I don't have enough musical talent to be tempted to do anything in that line other than occasionally hum the tunes from Singing In The Rain while showering or hopping down stairs.

[1] My father made very clear that whatever I did in consulting, if it was done by the hour, I must make clear that my time starts the moment I leave my front door and does not end until I go back through my front door. (But I may not make personal side trips however mileage- or time-efficient that would be.) I appreciate the wisdom of this choice, although I don't have people trying to get me to consult for them.