/lit/ - Literature

>>19388897
Do you mean adding illustrations to the book on a by-chapter basis? Are you asking for freelance indie artists or, well, actual somewhat big-name artists? This also depends entirely on whether you want anime-style or don't mind knock-off Indonesian/Korean/whatever style art, western anime/cartoon art, or realism art.

If you're interested in asian artists drawing anime-like art, you can expect "reasonably" cheap within the 500-1000$ range, just going by non-commercial personal use (like if you're writing for free somewhere without patreon and such). For anything else, your milage will vary wildly for a reasonable ballpark answer. Starving twitter artists particularly in the western community you might look close to $1200 is my guess, this is a most liberal estimate. Most of this so far is going off the assumption that you might have like 15-20 illustrations throughout the 100k book.

I'm mostly going by some of my favorite starving artists whose starting prices are in the 60-90$ range for just waist up and without backgrounds, again absolutely YMMV. Needless to say, as much as I love supporting my favorite artists because of an unhealthy commission hobby I haven't been commissioning many western artists in the past couple years. That one who I went off of took about 6 months to just start my commission.

No matter which region artist you might look into, one thing to bear in mind is an artist's availability; they might be willing to do just one or two of your requests when their commissions are open—so it might be best to get these commissions months ahead of time. I don't usually ask my go-to artists if I can carpet bomb their commission slots though, so if you're feeling more confident you could ask about paying in advance for numerous commissions. For this reason, I don't stick to commissioning one specific artist for my story and like to switch it up several of my favorite ones and as a means to support their art.

I'm only mentioning non-commerical personal use so far. If you're looking into opening up a Patreon or self or tradpublishing... that's going to be pricey—you might be looking at close to 2000$ or more for about 15-~20 chapter illustrations. I consulted an anon friend who got about 5 illustrations for his book and he paid around 1k$, but he said it was mainly out of goodwill because the artist was a graphic designer and needed extra cash. Western artists from my limited glances at ToS are particularly stingier about commercial rights (one was like 300% of price just for cover art) but Easterners don't really give as much as a shit from my experience—more chill, but YMMV.