Recently I had occasion to research rates charged by designers for text-based book work. I was trying to determine a reasonable price for a 320-page hardcover collected poems, interior and cover\/jacket design. Since I have mainly worked with heavily illustrated books over the past decade I had lost touch with going rates for text-based projects.<\/p>\n
According to the 2001 edition of the Graphic Artists Guild handbook of Pricing and Ethics,<\/em> for an average poetry book a designer might charge $7,500 to $15,000 to design and set the interior plus $1000-$2000 for the jacket. That gives a total range of $8500-17,000. Those figures are seven years old, but several people say the prices in this publication skew high.<\/p>\n For my informal survey I consulted four designers.<\/p>\n Designer A would charge $4-5\/pg, depending on complexity, on top of the design charge of $350-$500. Cover design would range from $350-$1000. If there’s a lot of text prep (coding), he charges that hourly ($50). This gives a total of $1980-3100, plus coding, by far the lowest fee in my sample.<\/p>\n Designer B would charge $20-25\/page “all in” as a nonprofit\/university press discount rate for a non-illustrated book. Plus revisions at $50\/hour. This would come to about $6400-8000, plus revisions fee. She says she gets $35-50 per page for an illustrated book from a commercial press, which obviously would as much as double the total.<\/p>\n Designer C would charge $1500 for the jacket + $1000-2500 for interior design + $8-15\/page typesetting. When she totaled this up she got $8800, suggesting she favors the high end of her range, and I expect she would much more often come in there than at her low end.<\/p>\n Designer D would simply charge a flat rate of $35-40\/page. This would come to $11,200-12,800. He claims “some people charge $65\/page.”<\/p>\n It’s interesting to see the different bases designers use for calculating fees and the different rates and totals yielded ($3100, $8000, $8800, $12,800; plus extras) for the same job.<\/p>\n .<\/p>\n