Speaker Fees

Mary Kelly and I do a bit of public speaking on the side. We love to present at library conferences, and we do a few every year. We usually represent Awful Library Books on the road, but sometimes we represent our workplace libraries. (We're careful to separate the two! We use vacation time from work to speak at library conferences that fall under the ALB umbrella.)

When we represent Awful Library Books, we usually get paid. We're very flexible with fees and will work with just about any budget, but we do need our travel expenses covered at the very least. Setting a speaker fee is a difficult thing! There are two of us, so we know we're more expensive than hiring one person - two airfares, two sets of meals, etc. It's that base fee that is tricky. In the past we have charged roughly what we make in a day at our regular jobs. We figured that we burned a vacation day to be there, so we'd like to be compensated for that vacation day. As much fun as we have at these speaking gigs, it's not exactly a vacation!

I'm interested to know what others charge. If you have time, please consider taking my quick, anonymous, two-question survey below. I'm interested in your speaking fees separate from travel and per diem - just the speaking part! I'll post the results next week.

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