A few people have asked me why I charge money upfront for writing workshops and for the writing online retreats. Why don’t I follow the COVID summit model of giving everything for free and up-charge for the right to access the video recordings later?
It’s a good question. Here is the simple answer:
- I believe the authors who come in and teach (including me) should be paid for their time, talent and expertise. All the authors I work with want other writers to succeed. That is their main mission. But they also have to eat and pay their rent. And I think too often they are expected to do things in exchange for “exposure” instead of money.
- Most people sign up for free stuff with no intention of attending. Humans simply don’t value FREE as much as they value something they’ve paid for.
More details:
To be honest, I considered the summit formula, but discarded it for several reasons. First, I’ve been in this business for a looooong time. Writers and readers get A LOT for free. Which is great when you’re shopping around for the people who you jive with and you trust. BUT when we get free stuff, we don’t value it as much as we do if we pay for it.
The truth is that authors put in quite a bit of effort into making workshops or speeches for summits that they believe will help writers. Time and effort that could be spent on their own writing. And they do it because they want to help writers and because it helps with exposure.
And exposure is great, but I’ve never once heard of someone who suddenly received tons of sales because they participated in a writing summit. I would love it if that happened, but when a summit has 7,10, 15 writers presenting, it’s difficult to stand out to very many people in the crowd. All that being said, we still LOVE doing summits because most of us genuinely want to help authors.
But I want to use a different model.
So I pay the authors who choose to come in and teach. For the retreats, regardless of whether anyone signed up, I have a contract to pay them. And one day, I hope to pay them more than what I’ve committed to at the moment. For the individual workshops, we split the profits 50/50, so there isn’t a guaranteed payout, but so far I’ve never had an author receive $0.
The other reason is that the amount of emails and hustle and follow up to remind attendees that they should buy the VIP ticket if they want access to the recordings is a lot of work. And at the moment, I’m the only one doing that work. Perhaps one day, if I can afford a VA, we might try the other model.
But again, I believe that authors should be paid for their time and expertise. And I believe people sign up for free stuff with no intention of attending all the time.
Each time you come to one of my workshops, you can be sure that the person teaching is being paid a flat sum PLUS their affiliate commission. Because that’s the way the world should work.