I hope that you got generously compensated for your work! I myself could unfortunately never personally make maps as beautiful as these ones.
Compensation is... well, hopefully adequate most the time. There's a lot of competition in this little niche, and if you're doing the fully handdrawn stuff like I do you obviously can't compete with the prices that some Pakistani guy on Fiverr throws out for maps he's doing on
Inkarnate or
Wonderdraft with no or hardly any additions.
I
do manage to schedule/plan most maps in a way that I end up above the comparable local minimum hourly wage, luckily.
As for you no being able to make something like my maps: honestly, ask me ten years ago and I would have said the same. What you see in this thread is, above anything else, the result of
patience rather than inate skill. So, my advice to you? Give it a try!
Honestly I'm surprised GRRM or another fantasy writer of his level hasn't hire you as a map maker yet!
Your stuff is much better than the official maps I see in ASOIAF.
Huh, I was prepared to tell you that the guys and gals working for the big hitters are way better than me, but then I looked at
Jonathan Roberts who did the maps for the GRRM compendium, and whose tutorials I used frequently in my earlier mapmaking days... and I think I don't have to hide my maps when compared to his (his GoT city maps are still way out of my league, though!).
That being said, most authors contracted by large publishing houses have little to no say in what kind of map artist does their stuff, which is why you get so many fantasy novels either using the authors' own (poor) sketches or using something that looks as if it's been slapped together in three hours by someone with a mouse in MS Paint:
because it's cheap.
I've been doing this as an amateur, and now professionally, for close to ten years, which is why I can gauge how much effort any given map will take pretty well. Black & white maps? Around ten hourse, give or take a couple. Colored? Twenty plus. Adjust either for size and extra details, and you can get up to fifteen for the black & white maps, and... pretty much open ended for the colored ones. Longest time I ever sat at a map? Probably
fifty hours.
Big publishers are ripe with horror stories of ripping off their creatives.
Latest case in point. I guess what I'm trying to say is this: know your worth. Know what your
time is worth. Don't work for name recognition, or to get a "big" industry name on your list of former clients, because nothing will ever come from it. Work the jobs that
pay. If Random House or Marvel sent me an email tomorrow with a commission offer that amounted to the same stuff that Anna mentioned in the linked video? That'd either land in my trash folder directly or earn them a barely polite reply pointing out my rates and the required workload.
If you dig through all the horror stories from creatives a pattern will emerge, that pattern being that more often than not, the bigger the publisher, the shittier the pay. So I'd much rather work with indies and small publishers where things are negotiated fairly and up front, and if you don't find a middle ground, well that's life.
