Speak Widely and Carry a Big App

 

The world’s your stage...

A mystery writer friend was delighted when a regional writing conference asked her to speak and offered an honorarium of $1,000. She arrived at the venue and discovered to her dismay that no one had bothered to tell her that she could sell her own books. (The organizers did not want to go to the trouble of asking a local bookstore to sell, and were too disorganized to spell out the DIY details.) She spent hours after her talk silently fuming while other authors sold books in a meeting space, swiping credit cards with Square readers.

Another friend, who writes in the horror genre, has grown accustomed to driving to any small conference that will have him. But when a library group in upstate New York contacted him, he calculated that he would need to drive 700 miles round trip. He declined rather than ask if they would consider chipping in for travel expenses. “I hate to bring it up,” he said. “It would be too awkward. Some of those peeps are my friends. But shouldn’t they give me something?”

Yeah, dude! I know it sounds nutty, but many civilians love hearing writers speak—and they are often willing to pay. You just need to know how to ask.

In the book world, it’s expected that an author will make bookstore or library appearances for free when on the road promoting a book. It’s now somewhat expected that you will make yourself available to Zoom with book clubs.

Beyond these, there are book festivals, library conferences, university speaker series, women’s clubs, corporate retreats, historic sites, and town hall venues that pay writers attractive fees to speak.

Strangely, many of these events don’t do book sales. The world of publishing is so opaque that outsiders reflexively avoid onsite sales because they seem like extra work. Reasons range from a) not knowing how to acquire and sell books themselves, b) not knowing that they can invite a bookseller, and c) feeling confused about how much time on the schedule they should allow for a book signing.

Worse, sometimes they will allow book sales, but think nothing of insisting on a 10 percent cut of sales. And they never understand why bookstores tell them to pound sand. “Do these people know how much we make on a book?” a bookstore owner once told me.

Most of the best-paying orgs hold a place of honor in the contact lists of major speaker’s agents. And yes, some speaker’s bureaus exclusively represent writers. Increasingly, such bureaus are embedded in the offices of the Big Five publishers. Why? Money.

Publishers have figured out that a cash payment plus book sales is lovely thing to behold. Authors should also grasp that when the average paperback royalty is seven percent, a $500 honorarium is the equivalent of selling 420 copies of a $17 paperback.

Speaker’s bureaus take a 20-25 percent commission on your speaking fee, but they are arguably worth it because they arrange the booking, book the travel, have someone standing by to deal with travel snafus as they arise on the road, and mail you a check with expenses when the whole thing is done.

They also have the chutzpah to do what most writers cannot do: ask people to pay them. We writers are coded to be payment-shy, which is why the worst publishers find us such easy prey.

The folks who work at the bureaus do what literary agents do. They advocate for us when we think it would appear gauche to advocate for ourselves. (Have you watched Uncle Harlan lately?)

That said, these bureaus are as tough to sign with as literary agents, but you don’t need one to handle the occasional speaking engagement that comes your way. You just have to be savvy and borrow a few tricks from their toolkit. I’ll mention two.

Speaker’s agents have a standard patter that goes something like this:

“Mr. Slapscribe is very much in demand, and we typically quote $15,000 for one of his appearances. However, I have seen him get much, much more, and I’ve seen him voluntarily take less because he was impressed with an organization’s past record of inviting mystery writers who wear unflattering fedoras. So don’t be put off by the fee. Fill out our questionnaire and bring us your best offer. We need to know what your organization can offer in terms of a speaker’s fee plus travel expenses. And we’ll go from there.”

It’s a spiel that asserts the price but still manages to sound welcoming. The “best offer” line is critical, because it invites event organizers with small budgets to throw their hat in the ring. They return to their team, hammer out their best package, and fill out the questionnaire. If the dollar amount falls below the bureau’s minimum, the agent typically routes the deal back to the author/speaker, saying: “Here—you can deal with this one yourself. There’s not enough money to interest us. But please, for the love of monkeys, don’t do too many of these cheap deals because word gets around.”

In our household, who do you think ends up dealing with the events my wife’s speaker’s bureaus reject? I hate talking about money with anyone, but when forced to do so, I do what any self-respecting writer would do: I hide behind my words.

Over the years, I have compiled my own questionnaire, adding all the questions I’ve seen on the documents of the name agencies and a few of my own. Now, when a fresh inquiry hits my inbox, I triage it immediately. Is it worth sending to her speaker’s agent, or can I handle it myself? (I can usually tell.)

Then I unfurl my own patter, according to a time-tested strategy. Is this an organization she has worked with before and adores? If they’re not “a friendly,” are they relatively nearby? Will a significant amount of travel be involved? Then I go from there. Here’s how you might do the same:

“Thanks for writing. I have always loved talking to your group. Do you mind filling this out for me? It probably touches on stuff that don’t apply to your event, but at least we will all be on the same page.”

“Thanks for writing. I am happy to travel within 60 miles of home to do these types of events. I’m wondering if your group can cover any travel expenses because I estimate this will take 6 hours round trip by car. Since you’re planning an evening event, I will will probably need to book a room for the night. Do you mind completing…”

“Thanks for writing. The festival sounds fun, and next May is doable, but since it’s in a different state, I’d need to see the overall package you’re offering guest authors before agreeing. Do you have something you can send, or do you mind filling out…”

The toughest one is saved for a certain type of inquirer who gives the impression that they are doing you a favor by asking you to work for free:

“Thanks for the invite. These days most of my author talks are paid, or they go on my waiting list. But I look at all the offers people send. All I ask if that you be up front and give me your best offer so I can consider it quickly in good faith. Attached is my questionnaire…”

Responding in this fashion usually weeds out the groups who are simply not organized. Some of them never write back. That’s fine. I am guided by two principles.

The first comes from the book Deep Work by Cal Newport, the computer scientist and attention management guru who famously does not respond to most emails, and forces his academic colleagues at Georgetown to boil their requests down to solid details before he will respond. The message is: Let’s not waste each other’s time. Summarize your expectations—all of them—in writing. If you can’t do this or find it onerous, we cannot work together.

The second is, humans are fallible. If an event organizer is not seasoned, it will not occur to them to mention that you can do book sales, or whether they can offer you a travel allowance, and so on. Inexperienced organizers are like deer in the headlights. They’re terrified. They are praying that you will make their problem go away by filling the empty slot on their schedule. If you say yes, they log you on the calendar and forget to tell you what is expected of you until it’s too late.

And that’s bad.

• If you knew that your hosts intended to post a recording of the event to YouTube, would you say yes?
• If you knew that they intended to sell tickets to your talk, would that change whether you did the talk for free?

Recently, for example, I have heard of two other annoying requests:

• If you knew that they insisted on seeing a copy of your talk or PowerPoint ahead of time, to make sure it was not “offensive,” would you agree?
• If they asked for a list of all your social media accounts to vet your level of “controversiality,” would you agree?

I swear I am not making this up.

Everyone’s circumstances are different, but a decent list of questions will unearth many of the issues that they will not think to share. The current version of my questionnaire lives on my website. Feel free to download the PDF, scrape and copy the text into a Word document, and tweak it with questions of your own. Send the document to correspondents, and see what happens. Three of the email openings I shared above raise the issue of some form of payment. The questionnaire asks it more explicitly. In the best-case scenario, prompted by the form, they will tell you if they can pay and how much.

Let me stress that it’s perfectly fine to do an event for zero payment. We do them all the time. We once participated in a well-run book festival where the only obligations were an hour-long talk on how one gets published (shoot me) and signing books for buyers in the sales room. They paid us $200 each for our time, and it was a lovely, 90-minute round trip through the mountains. We would do it again in a heartbeat. I’d just insist on a different topic.

I once did a Zoom event for an elementary school group for no payment, only to be surprised when a $50 check arrived in the mail with a school T-shirt, a mug, and a card signed by the students.

I will say that in the children’s book field, in-person school visits are no joke. They are often full-day events that involve leading one or more classrooms of squirming fifth graders in a writing lesson. Yeah—I would much prefer chatting on a four-person panel about how I do fiction research.

Many children’s book authors print flyers describing the type of events they offer for payment, and hand them out at conferences if anyone asks. Others post a one-sheet “explainer” PDF on their websites that school districts can download. Those docs spell out the types of talks they do, their ground rules, fees, and required deposit. (Example: the school district pays the writer a nonrefundable half-fee three months in advance to get booked on the schedule. That way, the writer does not book the flight unless money is in hand.)  

One of our friends, a bestseller in this field, states openly on his website that he charges for school visits because he’s a full-time professional author, and this is how he provides for his family. Can’t get any clearer than that.

It’s nice to work with people who appreciate what you have offered them. But far too many groups have gotten it into their heads that writers will do things for free because of the “good publicity.” And that’s just plain wacky.

My last tip comes from a young writer friend who has dealt with this attitude far too often. (You’ll see why I italicized that word in a second.) A while back he was asked to attend an event three states away for no pay or travel expenses. His room and board would be covered because he would crash with a fellow writer in the destination city. Rather than fly, he insisted on driving 521 miles in a single drive. (Times two, counting the return trip.)

“You’re kidding me, right?” I said.

“Naw. I’ll make money on the mileage alone,” quoth he.

He’d become such a pro at non-paying writer events that he counted on them to reduce his annual income taxes. For 2025, the US business mileage rate is 70 cents a mile. That means a 1,000-mile car trip to a nonpaying author event can, in theory, “earn” you a $700 income business tax deduction.

 
It’s the same sort of logic I have used to justify pricey conference expenses: “But we can deduct it!”

Said friend uses the QuickBooks mileage app to track out-of-town trips, not to mention his in-town “writer business” errands to bookstores, the library, the post office, the UPS Store, FedEx, Kinko’s, office supply stores, and driving to meet fellow writers for lunch. 

I asked my accountant about this, and he chided me for not doing it sooner. I prefer an app called MileIQ. (Both are subscription based, but even the subscription is tax-deductible.)

In closing, let me say that I wish you well, wherever such events take you. A world that wants to hear what writers have to say is a beautiful one indeed. It also better not make us angry. Long may we flap.

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See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com