Reply To: How much should I charge for complex layouts?

Thanks, Dwayne. You have a good point about subsequent passes, since we usually do those at my day job. I will say that publishers pay on the poor-to-middling end for projects like this, but this is what I’d call “assisted freelancing” with no overhead. They just placed me with the client. The distributor has a ballpark estimate of 200 pages of 8.5×11. Problem is the author wants it in a (much) smaller format and different proportions (5.5×8-ish) so I’m afraid that though she’s done a nice job of pre-layout work, it’s not going to be easy. At this point the question is if I’m going to need to change computers for this job (because this alone might justify doing that).

Go ahead and give me a ballpark figure if you have one, but my hunch is that the 50% down payment would have to cover the hardware (my computer by far exceeds Adobe’s *cough* recommended requirements) but it’s not up to the task of an image-heavy 200+ page book.