We need to be careful that we are comparing apples to apples here.

Not everyone's LO is worth $20. Some are newbies and just learning about placing items, correct shadows, textures, color schemes. Some are off the wall gorgeous that I will never achieve personally. We can't slap the same $$ ammount on those pages.

There are also big differences in what some consider to be 'custom' work. Is it custom just because the photos are personal? IE if you have preset page/templates that you just pop photos into, would you still consider that to be custom? Or do you think of custom when the entire page design is focused on that particular photo/client, ie montage, photo manipulation, wordart creation, etc? Those require a vast difference in the level of expertise and time.

I can see the benefit of offering both kinds of projects with different fees. Basic pages: no photo manipulation (except for tonal balance and red eye), no extractions from backgrounds, using your own 'preset pages with general color adaptions and additions of supportive embellishments. Deluxe pages: extractions, montages, fine art effects, the 'wow' factor, etc. The Basic pages could have a set price whereas you may offer the Deluxe pages on an hourly fee.

Part of setting up the scrap4others biz would be to create your Basic pages, an assortment of 1,2 and 3 photo LOs that you can easily swap papers in an out of to suit the particular theme. (FotoFusion is sooooooo great for this with the template feature), some wordart, and other basic elements. You also need to have a collection of legit use papers and elements on hand so that your time is spent designing the page not the embellishments.

You could suggest that an album be made up of mostly Basic pages with a couple Deluxe pages for those special photos.

Another factor is the journalling: telling the story is one of the most important aspects of scrapping. I have a ton of photos that came to us when inlaws passed last year. Even if they had been scrapped into pretty pages, they still would mean the same to me: WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE? This photo is really interesting but I have no clue who, what, when, or why about it. Titles on pages would be an improvement, captions with names and a couple statements would be even better, but the truly special LOs have the stories. That takes yet another expertise and TIME !

I did some albums for SIL based on her travels with sons, I never got the stories included but thru emails I was able to add names and some little quips. Whereas the album I did for my brother's family was a surprize so all I had was the photos, no explanations. It still worked out since is was a year in review of a family with 5 young children. But being able to write about some of the special events would have been nice but since I didn't even get to see them in that time period, except thru the photos, I was limited in what I could add.

okay, so you can see, that I too can be long winded. But this whole pricing thing is very complex and I don't want anyone to think that there is a blanket price recommendation for LOs.

--- and don't forget all the unpleasant chores that are necessary with a biz, that eats up your time and has to be covered in the funds that come in for the fun pages: bookeeping, taxes, computer maintainance, printer costs, advertising, etc

this wasn't a quick reply but that is the button I am using here LOL "post quick reply"

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tlc
child of the King - that makes me a princess !


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