We are discussing on the CL board at the moment ways in which we can help cartographers with pricing, but there are many competing principles to take into account. It's interesting that Arcana chose to call this place 'the Cartographers' Guild'. Original Guilds are described in Wiki as something between a trade union, a cartel and a secret society.
At one end of the scale we could, for example, have a minimum charge that all guildmembers MUST charge for commissions taken from the site. But this would just be unenforceable (people will just conclude the commission privately), and there's a feel of something unethical about it too. I also think that if we were to do this, most people wanting paid commissions would just go elsewhere, and we would alienate our users by prescribing what they do privately - maybe not?
At the other end of the scale we could take no action whatsoever about what people choose to charge (which is the situation at the moment), which might mean that people are charging much less for commissions than they might and falling prey to people like Jax has linked to and depressing the price (perhaps unwittingly) for artists in general.
What we are looking at is using the guild to provide information on commissions. We are trying to put together an questionnaire for people on the guild to provide anonymous data on the commissions we do so we at least get some idea of what the pricing ranges are. Pitching pricing correctly depends on what the final product (be it a book or a game) might be worth, or it might depend on getting a decent hourly rate for the work or it might depend on how much the commissioner can pay - (s)he might be a poor starving artist too. It's a tough choice but ultimately it must be an agreement between the seller and the buyer. What would be good though, is for the sellers to have more information - perhaps buyers too. I'd like to think that most people (sellerrs and buyers) are decent, honourable folk and if there was anything approaching what could be called 'a fair price' they would be happy with it. The 64 dollar question is trying to find out what a 'fair price' is.
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