Kuroyume: that's what I told the publisher. I live in the UK, that would be more or less the equivalent of what I'd get in an hour of piling cans at the local supermarket. They thought I was being unreasonable and having a diva fit.

As a comparison, I made £25 an hour for coding HTML +CSS while contracting, and although the hourly wage as a permie is quite lower than that, it still doesn't reach the abysmal price these people were prepared to pay.  Heck, even if I was using photos from iStockPhoto and trying to cut down time, I would still need to shell out at least $3 per 300dpi image I wanted to use.  At those rates, it isn't even pocket money; I'd be better served by doing images for free that I really want to do, or by training on something else to expand my earning potential, instead of wasting time and computer power on a book cover done for peanuts, that as such, will also not be the best I can produce, and will reflect badly on me as an artist.

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