Recently I wrote a blog post entitled Albums: Cost or Quality and it received a couple visits the day it was published. Later that night I was skimming through my Twitter feed when I noticed someone had tagged me in a response to my earlier blog post . Eager to see who the person was, I quickly clicked on the link. To my surprise, Zookie Pro, an album designing company had read my blog post and responded to it! Zookie Pro is a division of the album company Zookbinders, based out of Illinois.
I was first of all shocked that someone other than my mom read my blog, let alone a huge company like Zookbinders. Once I got over my initial shock and sat back in my chair I was so excited to see what they had to say. Through the course of a couple emails with Scott Patrick, veteran photographer and sales rep at Zookbinders, we discussed the idea of charging for creativity and our services as a photographer in album design and not necessarily marking up the product.
It was an interesting conversation we had and I realized I’m looking at my pricing from more of an emotional point of view and not nearly enough from a business point of view. I think there needs to be some emotion attached to your pricing however. It’s your business and if you are passionate about it, that emotion will spill over into your pricing one way or the other.
Since I’m just starting out, I feel like I have a lot of emotion tied to my pricing. Is it too high? Is it high enough? Am I simply giving my services away? What am I worth? Am I good enough to be charging these prices? What if people don’t hire me? Should I lower my pricing? How should I charge for albums? What kind of packages do I include? These are all thoughts that have run through my head, and sometimes still do.
Scott asked if he could use our conversation for a blog post on the Zookie Pro blog, he thought perhaps others could learn from our conversation and I was all for it. If I can help someone in any way, I’m all for it! If you’d like to read the blog post, here is the link to it. Thank you Scott, for taking the time to help a newbie out! I appreciate your kindness.
Let me know what you think! I’d love to hear your thoughts or ideas!
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