Obviously missed this the first time around. I agree: $10/pg should be the absolute floor. Push for $15 every time and maybe we can get this up. I’ve NEVER taken a paying gig for less than $10 and I was a terrible letterer when I started!
As Aditya says, there are well-established letterers doing work for big companies on $20/pg and that’s not right.
Also, back end deals: I’ll only do back end for people I know and trust. Additionally, if you’re getting cut in for say 5-10%, ask for the same cut of the IP.
You may not get it, but if the book you worked on is a huge success and you took a chance on a back end deal, why the hell shouldn’t you get a percentage on that Hollywood/Netflix/HBO deal?
To be clear: I’ve been doing this for nearly 12 years as a full-time professional. I’ve got well over 50,000 pages under my belt and a bunch of award nominations, and I still haven’t got my overall average page rate above $20.
I was away from desk and couldn't pull up the figures readily last night, but in the (belated) interests of full #PublishingPaidMe disclosure…
Current lowest rate: $15
Current highest rate: $35
Basic rate for new projects: $20*
Average rate in June: $22 (approx)**
*With some wiggle room for creator-owned with back-end, or indy/small press who I want to give a break to.
** Mixed currencies, so some slight vagaries on the exchange rate.
Final footnote, I promise: that average page rate is just a straight mean average of the rate on every book I did in June. If I weight it by volume, it falls sharply to under $18/pg.
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So…I deleted my Watchmen tweets because someone decided to jump in on the end of the thread & start tagging in just about everyone who's ever worked for DC. I thought deleting the 1st tweet would nuke the thread…but, no, so I had to delete a bunch of now-contextless replies. 1/
To be clear, though, I stand by everything I said in those original tweets. To wit: 2/
[Watchmen tweets redux!] Moore & Gibbons signed a contract in the confident expectation that they would, at some point in the future, regain the rights to their work. I haven't read the contract; I am not a contract lawyer, but… 3/
There are very few hard 'rules' for comic lettering, not least because you're always playing a hand the artist and writer have dealt you, but there's an awful lot of *preference*. For example, I've found myself leaning away from using connectors to link balloons…
Hard Rule #1, if anyone's interested: READING ORDER. I don't care how much art I have to cover up, I will *not* leave a panel or a page with unclear reading order. My job is to serve the story, not work around poor planning by the artist.
Hard Rule #2: NEVER CROSS TAILS. I can conceive of situations where the story might make it logical (maybe with characters talking across each other?) but in 60,000+ pages lettered, I've *never* done it.
Listen up, young freelancers! Gather round my camp fire and harken to a cautionary tale…
…I spent 15yrs being a graphic designer, and the last 12 being a letterer. And I spent the bulk of those years sitting in the cheapest, shittiest office chairs giving not the slightest thought to posture or ergonomics…
…As a result, I have a stoop that’s one step from getting me a bell ringer’s job at Norte Dame and can now turn my head about 8° left and right from straight ahead…
I'm seeing multiple people posting a comparison of various face masks including their filtration rates and basically saying that if you're not wearing a surgical-grade mask, you're wasting your time. THIS IS NOT TRUE. 1/
It's scandalous that there is no clear guidance on this, but as best I can understand the current scientific thinking:
The risk of COVID transmission from surfaces is fairly low. The primary transmission method is person-to-person. 2/
You cannot buy a mask with a sufficiently fine weave, or with a filter capable of stopping the virus. However, the virus is not intrinsically airborne, it's carried in the water droplets we exhale. 3/
To friends in the UK who are currently home-working/furloughed/otherwise stuck at home:
There's a heatwave coming this week and you're all going to be stuck in non-air-conditioned homes as the temperatures rise. Here are a couple of handy hints… 1/
1) Your home is designed to retain heat. If you try to cool it once it's getting warm, it's too late. Open any doors & windows you can first thing in the morning — the earlier the better. The cooler your living space is, the further into the afternoon it will remain tolerable. 2/
2) If you have loft/attic space, open the hatch/trapdoor into the roof — your loft insulation will stop the rising heat and trap it but if you open the hatch, the hot air can continue to rise and the heat can dissipate through the roof. 3/3