When I work for people, making a chart, it took me a while to come up with a clean way to charge. The fees must vary for different purposes. Am I doing an original arrangement, or am I doing a transcription?
For all you engravers out there, here's a place I've kind of settled on.
I've started with a base fee, which is tied directly to the number of staves required. Let's say I'm doing a string arrangement. There will be five staves (two violin parts). At $5 a staff, that's a $25 base fee.
From there, I add a negotiable fee of $.03-.05 per element. Using a finale plugin, I have it count all the various elements, total them, then add the sum to the base fee.
So for this string arrangement, I may have a base fee of $25 plus 324 notes, 89 rests, 98 smart shapes, 45 text expressions, etc, etc (whatever element-type I think is worthy of a charge) add those elements together and you get 556 elements times $.03 = 16.68 or times $.05 = 27.80. Add this to the base fee of $25 and you get either $41.68, or $52.80.
The reason I think this is equitable is because it helps the buyer know that he/she is not getting ripped off if your entire arrangement is a lot of whole notes. On the other hand, if you've taken the time to put in intricacies, articulations, etc, etc, you will be compensated for it appropriately.
