Dear friend, as a photography entrepreneur, charge 25% more for your services than you think you should!

Why charge premium prices for your services?

Why?

Well, this is my rationale:

If you’re a newbie entrepreneur, we are generally uncertain what to charge for our services or our products. Therefore we generally charge too little.
Therefore as a good heuristic (mental rule of thumb, shortcut), consider charging 25% more than you initially thought.
When you charge more for your products or services, people will generally think it’s more valuable. This is called a “veblen good” or “veblen effect”; we make a mental shortcut that more expensive things are better quality, more reliable, and work better. This is why we will spend $5 on Tylenol to cure our headache, whereas we won’t buy the $1 generic ibuprofen which is technically the same thing, but we think the $5 dollar medicine will work better (and it does, the placebo effect is real!)

In my own real life, my photography entrepreneurship, workshops, and selling my own products has been the same. I’ve always been puzzled how much to charge for it. And through the last 8 years of running my own business, I’ve discovered:

When in doubt, charge more.

Consider, we generally discount or don’t think about all the time, labor, energy, and human metabolism that goes into our services or the work we do.

For example if you shoot a wedding, you’re not just shooting the wedding. You’re driving there, prepping for the wedding, getting insurance on your gear, you’re processing and editing the photos, you’re backing it up and sending it over. All that labor you’re probably not thinking of!

If you’re selling a photography book, consider all the time needed to actually shoot the photos, the money spent on your gear and equipment, and the time you needed to edit, sequence, print, or distribute the book.