I’ve just been paid R15,000 for dressing up in a black tie and having dinner with a few hundred people. Well, to be honest, I had to stand behind a microphone on a podium and make a few wisecracks before introducing the proceedings during the evening but that was about it. Everything went swimmingly, the audience laughed at all the right moments, the client was ecstatic and the money was in the bank within days. Multiply the evening’s earnings by twenty for a full month’s work and then by ten and a half for the average number of months in a working year and you get R3,150,000. You can double that if you want to look at work hours expended compared with a normal working day. R6,300,000 a year…not bad for a lowly columnist.
Of course, while it’s amusing to do these calculations, it’s absolutely meaningless because nobody is invited to act as an MC every evening of the week, although the ubiquitous Tim Modise must be coming close. So, to compensate for the irregularity of the work, most celebrity MC’s and speakers now demand considerably more than my rather modest R15,000. A well-known sports personality charges R65,000 for a forty minute presentation and a black television presenter is rumoured to have received R40,000 for a ten minute appearance from an insurance company keen to flaunt their new found liberalism.
Compared to the effort of sitting in front of a blank computer screen and attempting to knock out an eight hundred-word article, standing up in front of a few hundred people and saying whatever comes into your head is a doddle. If you find the idea intimidating try thinking of the money and see if that helps. An eight hundred-word article will, perhaps, earn you R1,600 or R2,400 if you’re really lucky. If it’s any good, it’s almost certainly taken as long to conceptualise, write and polish as the average corporate dinner for which you can earn a thumping R15,000.
The upshot of all this is that I’ve finally come to the conclusion that writing is for the birds. From now on I’m going to produce just enough writing to keep myself in the public eye and devote much more time to these highly remunerative public appearances. The money will go towards building libraries for un-rehabilitated plagiarists.
A journalist friend of mine on the conference circuit is making an absolute fortune and good luck to him. He has discovered that companies will pay handsomely for him to state the bloody obvious at corporate seminars. So he goes along to, for example, a major brewing company, delivers a really fired up motivational talk and advises them never to try to sell beer to Muslims or teetotalers because these people are not their core customers. No one’s ever suggested this sort of thing before so they give him a standing ovation with tears of gratitude in their eyes. Initially I was rather disapproving because I thought it was immoral to charge a lot of money for talking mumbo-jumbo but I’ve come to realise that many companies can’t be bothered to think laterally and are happy to pay someone else to do it for them.
I have been told that, at R15,000 for an evening, I am under-pricing myself. Perhaps I am, but I’m a man of simple tastes and am quite happy with both my fee structure and my expanding client base. Obviously none of this would have happened if I hadn’t decided to churn out a few columns over the past ten years. So isn’t it a delicious irony that I am being paid considerably more for not writing than I am for writing?