Many authors have real difficulty deciding what to charge for events. I sympathise. This post is designed to help and to get you thinking. And to encourage us to value what we do.
Some people say they set their fees low so that they will get more events because they need the income. That's fine. I take a different view. I also
very much need the income, believe me, but my strategy is to charge a higher fee (but still usually below professional, industry rates for public-speaking), to do fewer events but generate the same income overall. (And to leave time for writing.) So, this isn't necessarily about who can afford to do what - it's about what works for you. Let's not become divisive about this. I want to empower writers to work out what will be good for them, their writing and their careers. We are all individuals. ("Yes, we
are all individuals...")
Anyway, setting a fee is tricky. There is one main reason why it's so tricky: if an event is an hour long and we charge £150, for example, that looks like a
very generous rate for an hour's work. But let me say this three times:
It is not an hourly rate.
It is not an hourly rate.
It is not an hourly rate.
Any hour-long school event takes far more than the hour. In fact, I worked out that,
on average, each individual event takes two days of my time, including the day one which the event happens. I
have blogged in more detail about this and how I decide what to charge. Moreover, the events I'm choosing nowadays tend to take much more than two days, because I'm doing bespoke brain and teenage stress events.
And that's why £150 is not enough. And that's why I usually (but not always) charge more. What I charge depends on what the school asks me to do. Usually, I offer options, so that they can find one that suits their budget. For example, here's part of an email I sent a school recently. They had said they wanted "something during the day and an evening talk for adults". Note that this involves travel from Scotland to the south of England, so there's at least one day spent travelling but not earning.
And please bear in mind that these prices include the preparation time etc, so even the daily total is not the income for that one day alone.Option A: One normal author talk during day - £225. Plus an evening talk for teachers/parents - £225. Total £450.
Option B: Two normal author talks during the day - £350. Plus evening talk for teachers/parents - £225. Total £575.
Option C: One writing workshop (up to 2 hours) OR a workshop on the brain/teenage brain/or teenage stress OR a talk to a larger audience on the brain/teenage brain/stress - £350. Plus an evening talk for teachers - £225. Total £575. (By "talk" I mean more like a lecture with Q&A, but not workshop activities.)
Option D: One writing workshop OR one brain talk for large audience with Q&A OR one brain/stress workshop for a smaller group - £350. Plus one normal author talk OR a repetition of the first workshop/talk - £175. Plus an evening talk for teachers - £225. Total £750
Note that one talk during the day is relatively more expensive than two. That's because two talks don't take twice as much time as one. If I'm away doing events, I'd rather do more than one a day, so my fee structure works for that.
Even if they take Option D, that £750 probably has to cover four days, as the preparation will be major. So, it may sound like a lot, but it isn't when you realise how many hours of work it is.
So, I'm still not quite being paid along the lines of a "Lead Practitioner" (see below), but I charge more for keynote speeches at conferences, and sometimes schools take more expensive options, so it averages out to a fee level I can manage. I wish I could afford to do cheap events, but I just can't - or I'd have to do so many that I'd have no time for writing and, I feel, the quality of my events would suffer.
Last time I did a free event, by the way, was for a charity - one I don't support. I discovered there was an audience of over a thousand, each paying £30-£40. I'd spent three days on that. Never again. Sorry.
Society of Authors rates? There is no such thing. Competition laws prevent the SoA from providing such guidelines any more. See
here for the current wording. Any rates that people keep quoting as "SoA rates" were historical and are out-of-date.
I think this quote from the SoA page is particularly useful: "Authors may wish to base their fee, for either single visits or longer residencies, pro rata, on the annual salary they would expect to earn. See
Andrew Bibby’s reckoner, which shows daily rates to equate with different salaries. Authors delivering schools events may be interested that the
NASUWT 2013 salaries for
Lead Practitioners (excluding London and the Fringe) are between £37,836 - £57,520."
Thus, supposing you equated your "value" with that of a "Lead Practitioner" in the teaching profession and imagined yourself on a (dream!) salary of £40k, which is to the lower end of that scale, you'd need to charge a daily rate of £427 - and, in theory, you should build in the preparation and travelling time, too, so you would need to charge more than £427 for the day of the school visits. Remember, too, that people on salaries have sick pay and pensions built in.
Alan Gibbons, in his Campaign for the Book, mentions £450 a day. Campaigning for books incorporates campaigning for libraries and for authors, because without authors there are no books. He told me that he believes we should all consider the following principles, and I agree:
1) "Authors need a sense of a minimum market fee." (You might note the fact that Scottish Book Trust have, since 2005, paid £150
per talk for their funded events, and this is widely used as a basic minimum in Scotland. So, three talks in one day = £450,
plus all expenses. Many authors charge more.)
2) "They are providing a service that merits payment." (Yes, not just because of the time involved, which is far more than the hours in front of the audience, but also because a writer's expertise is built up over many years and is valuable.)
3) "More experienced writers owe it to those starting out to set a principle that an author visit is paid work."
4) "They should be paid a fee, accommodation and travel if necessary."
5) "They are free to do pro bono events for specific reasons but the previous four considerations should generally apply." (Of course, every author is entitled to do a free event, perhaps as a loss leader, or because of a personal connection with the school, but the organiser really ought to understand that you are in effect giving up your income, and will likely be the only unpaid adult there.)
And I would add a sixth: "A fee is not an hourly rate."
Yes, I worry very much about stretched school budgets, believe me, but funding an event shouldn't start by underpaying an author, who is almost certainly earning painfully little from writing. Everyone is stretched - schools, parents, but authors, too. Yes, I worry that some schools will feel they can't afford an author visit but that has always been the case, I'm afraid, and there are creative ways to fund things. The value of a good event by a talented author/illustrator/speaker is enormous and long-lasting, going way beyond what happens on the day. I worry about schools that don't recognise that, focusing only on that hour and thinking that the hour cost them £150 (or whatever).
But I worry more about us selling ourselves short, suffering because we are uncomfortable about charging what we are worth. I've done it myself - I know how hard it is not to, when we want to say yes, we need the work, we enjoy the events and we like the school which is inviting us. I worry when an author tells me that by the time she got home from a long distance event her fee had been consumed by the travel and subsistence costs because she didn't feel able to charge expenses. I worry about authors being the lowest paid adult at the event. I worry about festivals, such as Cheltenham, asking authors if they'd like to donate their fee back, when they haven't asked the electricians, sound engineers, publicity people, printers, booksellers etc to do the same. I worry about people thinking authors are not worth being paid fairly. I worry about authors not thinking authors are worth being paid fairly.
I worry that if we don't value ourselves, no one else will.
The FCBG was founded 40 years ago by Anne Wood, whose deep interest in children’s later led to ground-breaking children’s TV, like Teletubbies. (To learn more of her story, listen to her recent appearance on Desert Island Discs). At that time, her main interest was as a parent – and I suspect parents still make up the bulk of the FCBG’s members.
