What do you think is a good practice and what would you recommend?
I can only speak for myself, to be starters. After lots of pondering, this is what I discovered for my business.
I've charged for my deliverables (albums and what nots), made sure that I have some margin to add to my profits.
I've charged for my hourly rates.
I've taken into account on my projected expenses based on the gross profit of my hourly charges and products.
Then I realised I've never really charged for my digital negatives.
On the point of view of the consumers, I would expect, that whatever delivered to me, has been charged in the price I paid. With that logic in mind, I would have certain expectation of everything that's delivered, inclusive of the digital negatives. This has been proven by recent unhappiness over the disappointing quality of the digital negatives. I believe in order to meet this level of expectation, or even to attempt to meet this level of expectation, substantially higher costs have to be incurred in order to meet this expectation.
While it's unfair to assume all clients would have the same kind of expectation as the unhappy clients highlighted recently, I think it would be a safe projection that such demands would be prevalent in the near future, and steps have to be taken to prepare for that scenario. Some possible increase in costs would be hiring few more 2nd shooters, using more higher end equipment such as 1DsIII to reduce incidence of camera focusing errors, shooting with only primes, hiring assistant to only change my lenses and sling my cameras etc, just to ensure that all shots are
sharp enough.
To devote more time to the digital negatives to bring them closer to the quality of the images I use for the album and/or my portfolio, I would have to hire a full-time digital artist (which some local photogs have done so, btw, and also a common practice in many parts of the world) so that it's more manageable.
If the above is to materialize, I don't see think it's possible to just bundle the digital negatives as part of the deal given my current charges.
In the near future, for my business, the files will only be given if clients have paid for it in some form. Either in their coffeetable album, or photo slideshows. I would probably start implementing various purchase options in terms of digital negatives which has to be meaningful to the couple as well as to my business's existence and growth. For example, right now I don't sell 4R albums anymore, but mainly coffeetable albums. So the new model, if clients want shots which don't go into the album (such as group photos and such), they might have to opt of a 4R package and buy them in blocks of 90, which means they'll receive both the files and the 4R prints.
Ultimately, they won't be paying for what they don't like, and thus hopefully, enable me to meet their expectations better.
Sorry if I sound confusing, coz I'm still in the brainstorming stage.