No!Spec

The joke in the illustration industry is that there are so many desperate young artists and so much competition and hustling that pretty soon artists will be paying publishers to publish their work.

Uh... yeah, well... they're already doing it.

Suppose you're a graphic design/ illustration student right out of college and you're super stoked about getting into the industry right away. You see a job posted by a well-known publisher for an Art Contest for one of their products, and you think, "Heck, I could win that, and it will give me the break I need to get into the industry. Besides, it's only  $25 to enter."  You vaguely remember your folks spouting some old chestnut like "It takes money to make money." In the distance you see stars-- the promised land of plenty, fame, and glory-- and you go for it.

For hours you slave away on thumbnails, thinking hard about the client's project specifications and possible meanings, researching the company's products, etc; hammering out your design and compositions and then you spend an entire day making careful color studies, confident that the color compositions work clearly with the design and idea. Then you spend a few days working on the clean execution of the final product. You submit your work by the given deadline and patiently await the results.

The jury selects another person's artwork.

What do you have? Well, an optimistic person will chalk it up to lack of experience; they will say that they have another great piece in their portfolio; they will say that perhaps they selected the wrong company and that they will do better next time. All of these may be true, but the bald reality of it all is, you're crushed because not only have you not been noticed by "the industry," but the company has YOUR design.

That's right. You gave away your design. For FREE.

Now, this isn't really about a faceless corporation using your design without your consent, because no reputable company would ruin its good name doing something so low as outright stealing. No, it's about the fact that you have just driven the market prices for artwork lower for everybody.  And why wouldn't the publishing companies be okay with that? It's the most ideal situation in which they could find themselves. They simply put out a call for entries for a contest-- spending none of their own money in the process-- and get hundreds of design ideas for which they have the pleasure to sort through, choosing the one(s) closest to their idea. The one happy winner who gets paid for their selected design, may see an advancement to their career, but often one design does not a unified and complete portfolio make. What is also likely is that none of the designs submitted really work at all, so the company still has to put a seasoned designer on the project to cobble together two or three of the best designs; by putting their own "stamp" on it, it wouldn't be stealing at all. Similarly, in the illustration industry there are contests galore-- this is seen this more often with a gaming company putting up a kickstarter -- where the winner gets paid a paltry $50, but the illustration ideas that are submitted get wedded to the brand and are passed around for "inspiration."

And you've paid for it.

Every time a new artist on the scene who wants to price compete with peers declares to a client that s/he "can do the job for a lot less," all artists across the land see the value of their livelihood decreasing. It is no secret that the fees for illustrations have remained nearly the same in 40 years-- and in some genres has seen a sharp decrease. (A colleague of mine who worked in the pulp-romance paperback genre said that when she started a decade ago she was making $250 per cover, but that has dropped now to $75-50 with the proliferation of facile photo-montage cut-and-pasters.)

If you are interested and want to be more informed on this subject, you can learn more at this site; No!Spec. It has a ton of facts concerning spec work and why you should avoid it, and if you're a publisher, why it hurts your business.