How to price photography is the number one thing I am asked about from photographers. So in light of that, I have put together a review on a photography pricing guide by Lawrence Chan, also known as Tofurious. Let me just start off this review with letting you know I highly recommend this ebook for wedding photographers (obviously, or I would not be promoting it!). If you are trying to figure out how to price your packages, you will find a lot of guidance in here.
The advice and strategy works for both emerging photographers trying to figure out how to price photography from the get-go as well as established professionals with pricing already in place, but considering some changes.
What is different about this pricing guide is that instead of providing you with pricing formulas, it delves into the psychology of pricing and putting packages together in a way that creates the desired effect. Let’s get straight to it, shall we?
The first topic Chan covers is choice and the psychology behind offering enough selection versus overwhelming prospective clients with too many choices to the point of paralysis. He makes a lot of good points and uses lots of examples to illustrate his points.
The next area of focus is discounting and how that can adversely affect your clients’ perception of you and your services. Again, it’s the many examples from restaurants (he’s big on food) that help drive home the points. Later in the guide, he circles back and talks about freebies and incentives, but as an added value instead of simply discounting your pricing. It’s a subtle difference, but he explains that it’s the perception that clients have about your services is most important. He explains that if you first establish the value in your services, you can later add incentives.
This leads right into the next section on quantity, quality and value. As wedding photographers, we can all offer 8 hours of coverage, two photographers and a Leather Craftsman album, so how can we distinguish ourselves other than price? This is a key area for wedding photographers to understand because it gets right to the heart of being compared to your competitors, and how to avoid competing on price or specific type of service or product.
Over half the book is dedicated to discussing how to set up your packages-from how many to include to what to call them. This is my favorite part of the guide-I have not seen this kind of information available in the photography industry, and it is very comprehensive, in an easy-to-understand format with all his food examples.
I am a firm believer in the importance of offering packages as part of your photography pricing strategy. I know from experience I have booked bigger packages and sold more products than my competitors (and friends) simply due to having a well thought out package structure. In my opinion, if you don’t offer packages to your clients you are leaving money on the table. <–Click to Tweet. And you know how I feel about that!
The book wraps up with several chapters that offer tips on presenting your pricing and packaging when meeting with clients. A lot of the advice feels very familiar to me because I have used many of the principals to develop my own pricing.
You’ll still need to do the actual work of figuring out your pricing, but armed with this information, you’ll be much more likely to succeed. As a bonus, you’ll also get to see the packages offered by this high-end photographer, so you can see the different strategies in practice.
Once you go to his site you’ll find it filled with reviews from happy photographers saying how after they implemented some of his strategies, they saw an immediate increase in earnings to the tune of thousands of dollars. I can personally attest to this because I’ve been using these strategies in my packages for years. At $69, it’s a great investment, go grab it: Creative Pricing and Packaging for Photographers!
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