Thoughts on Pricing

As artists we often struggle with the jaberwocky that is pricing... The real beast is the conflict between a need to make enough off of our work to live (hopefully in a comfortable fashion) and what the public is willing to pay. Now I personally have two views on this subject that affect my thoughts on how I price my work.

First and foremost is that work should be equal to its price! There is far too much garbage out there that is priced way above

That being said I have a way of working that figures price out for me. I said to myself: "self, what sort of living would you like to make?" The answer to this question is that I would like to make a billion dollars a month, however I am aware that this is a bit far reaching for anyone other than billy boy gates and especially so for an artist. So for a more reasonable way to figure pricing I took the money I make as a soldier (if active it comes to roughly 55k a year), which is a nice income that I live with very comfortably. I then factored in the fact that I am an "emerging artist" and came up with a sum that I could survive on (25k would allow me to pay bills, eat, and have frugal fun). However the goal of life is not to just survive so I factored in a growth rate, I would like to also save 5k a year to my savings (minimum), and I would like my income to increase by 2-6k a year.

So the base income that I would like to make via my work is 30k per year. This comes to an hourly wage of about 15 dollars, now this is a base salary. The fact remains that I have yet to be granted a letter to hogwarts by either an owl or a bearded half giant on a moterbike, so I cannot magic up my materials with the wave of my wand. So I double my hourly income to 30 dollars and work more than 40 hours per week, I haven't done real "math" on the figures but my hillbilly calculations tell me that this will make up for work not sold, taxes, and material/ firing costs... in an ideal world. Of course the truth is I could get stuck with a whole lot of work that doesn't sell and that's just life. Cheers!