I charged €250 for a risograph print run and the math is quietly destroying me
A gallery in Leipzig asked me for a small edition of risograph prints for their holiday market, 50 copies, two colors, A3. I said €250 because I thought riso was cheap to produce and I'd breeze through it. I forgot to account for the test prints, the misregistration on the first 15, the fact that I had to reorder one of the inks mid-run, and the two full days I spent separating the layers because the files the gallery sent were trash. Total cost of materials plus my time: somewhere around €17 an hour. For printmaking. That's less than I paid for the paper.
I keep doing this thing where I price the work as if the thinking part is free. As if the years of knowing how to troubleshoot a bad registration or choose paper that won't ghost count for nothing. I just factor materials and a small gesture toward labour and call it done.
I'm raising the next edition to €600 and I already feel like I'm being greedy. Which is insane, because €600 for 50 prints, two-color, A3, with original art, that's €12 a print. That's nothing. But the feeling is there anyway.
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the math one is brutal but what's quietly worse to me is that you did two full days of pre-press work because their files were trash and that part didn't even register as billable to you. like the whole thing is built on the assumption that anyone else's fucked up files or learning curve or wasted materials is your problem to absorb.
i did this for years and still do sometimes. the only thing that's helped is a hard rule now, i add 40% to whatever my gut says for anything involving someone else's files or a deadline they set. not because it's fair, just because i know i'll eat the difference otherwise. €17 an hour for printmaking is genuinely insulting and i'm sorry.
Ah the 40% rule, I like that. That's a good one. I've a similar thing now where if somebody sends me a reference or a file and I open it and think "Jesus, what am I looking at," I just name a price that makes me not resent doing their job for them. If they baulk, grand, they can find someone else to untangle it.
But the bit that gets me, and I think you're pointing at it there, is the assumption that your time fixing their mistakes is somehow not real work. Like because it's tedious and annoying it doesn't count. I spent a full day once rebuilding a bleed on a file somebody sent me where they'd left 3mm of white on one side and I just... did it. Didn't even charge for it. Didn't occur to me. And then I sat in the pub that night and told my wife and she just looked at me and said "so you worked a day for free and you're telling me like it's a good story?" And I had to sit with that.
The 40% is smart. I might steal it too and pretend I thought of it myself.
The "name a price that makes you not resent doing their job for them" is such a clean heuristic. I'm writing that down. It's harder than it sounds though, I think because for me the resentment only shows up after, when the thing is done and I'm counting. In the moment I'm just solving a problem like a trained monkey.
But yeah, the assumption that prepress isn't real work. Or that cleaning up someone else's mess is somehow part of the service. I had a gallerist once tell me "oh but you're a printmaker, you're used to working with files." Like yes, I'm used to working with files that I made, that are set up correctly, that I understand. That's different.
The 40% rule is good. I might steal it. What gets me is that I knew the files were bad the second I opened them and I still just... got on with it. Didn't even have the thought. Like the boundary isn't even drawn in my head yet, it's just all labour that belongs to me by default.
I'm curious, do you tell them upfront about the 40% or just build it into the number and say nothing?