4 ms·

Do they give a discount for speaking gigs in/around their hometown? It seems like 90+% of the "work" (and certainly the time) involved in most of the out-of-tow

Do they give a discount for speaking gigs in/around their hometown? It seems like 90+% of the "work" (and certainly the time) involved in most of the out-of-town speaking gigs would be traveling to and from them, rather than the actual speaking.

saurik 10y ago
I give a lot of talks, and coming up with engaging content and organizing it, often with visual aids (though I realize many of these extremely highly paid people don't use those; but I will say that having engaging material without visuals is even harder....), is enormously time consuming. The time I spend traveling is meanwhile relatively meaningless. To compare: thing of a stand up comedian, and ask yourself if 90% of their "work" is driving to the venue.
- throwaway287391 10y ago
  Sure, but the time spent creating the talk content is amortized over all the times it's given. I doubt most of the speakers listed in the article are creating custom talks for each speaking gig they're hired for. (From the article: "A $20,000 to $200,000 check may or may not buy a customized speech.") In my experience, if I can repeat (or mostly rehash/remix) previous talk(s) I've given, the marginal cost of giving another one is ~3 hours for one in my area vs. 1-3 full days for out of town.
- perlgeek 10y ago
  The real question is how often you can give the same talk (possibly with slight variations) in different locations, because each performance of the same speech amortizes the time cost to prepare it initially.
zacharycohn 10y ago
Don't sell yourself by the hour. Sell by value.
- throwaway287391 10y ago
  But 'time is money' is even truer for busy famous people like these than for typical hourly wage earners. If demand were infinite, they could probably do something like 5x as many in town speaking gigs as out of town ones, and still have more downtime. And when not speaking/traveling I'm sure they have any number of things they'd rather be doing. Perhaps I phrased this suboptimally by asking about a "discount". Maybe a better question would be, is there a surcharge for the travel time required for out of town gigs?

saurik 10y ago

I give a lot of talks, and coming up with engaging content and organizing it, often with visual aids (though I realize many of these extremely highly paid people don't use those; but I will say that having engaging material without visuals is even harder....), is enormously time consuming. The time I spend traveling is meanwhile relatively meaningless. To compare: thing of a stand up comedian, and ask yourself if 90% of their "work" is driving to the venue.

throwaway287391 10y ago
Sure, but the time spent creating the talk content is amortized over all the times it's given. I doubt most of the speakers listed in the article are creating custom talks for each speaking gig they're hired for. (From the article: "A $20,000 to $200,000 check may or may not buy a customized speech.") In my experience, if I can repeat (or mostly rehash/remix) previous talk(s) I've given, the marginal cost of giving another one is ~3 hours for one in my area vs. 1-3 full days for out of town.
perlgeek 10y ago
The real question is how often you can give the same talk (possibly with slight variations) in different locations, because each performance of the same speech amortizes the time cost to prepare it initially.

zacharycohn 10y ago

Don't sell yourself by the hour. Sell by value.

throwaway287391 10y ago
But 'time is money' is even truer for busy famous people like these than for typical hourly wage earners. If demand were infinite, they could probably do something like 5x as many in town speaking gigs as out of town ones, and still have more downtime. And when not speaking/traveling I'm sure they have any number of things they'd rather be doing. Perhaps I phrased this suboptimally by asking about a "discount". Maybe a better question would be, is there a surcharge for the travel time required for out of town gigs?