How do you keep earning money when giving talks all the time ?
Do they pay the airfare and accommodation ?
Does their work sponsor them or do they take personal holiday ?
Depends!
At PyCon US/EuroPython everybody pays by default and the money goes towards financial aid so as many people as possible can attend. As a speaker, you can also apply for finaid of course.
The bet is basically that people that are able to attend today are the speakers of tomorrow. And anecdotally, it’s working out quite fine!
I let my employer pay my way to PyCon US and EuroPython because I’d attend anyway. PyCon ZA is special, because it’s in Cape Town and I like to surf so I pay myself. :)
Other than that, if a conference wants me as a speaker, they have to pay for my travels and accommodation. I’m also a diva and ask for SkyTeam flights which at least gives me indirect benefits (status miles + segments towards my status).
I don’t have to take personal holidays because I work at a small company and being able to exchange myself professionally with other peers is critical to my growth as an employee.
All that said, you speak because you enjoy the experience. I also got to see Japan, Russia, Ukraine, … all places I wouldn’t have gotten to see! To make a living with it you’ve got to be famous/influential already.
Just to add on — here's the rationale behind it: http://jessenoller.com/blog/2011/05/25/pycon-everybody-pays
Very few conferences pay speakers - even keynote speakers. The exceptions seem to be conferences explicitly organized around a particular proprietary technology, and sponsored fully by the company that makes that technology. Most community-organized conferences or conferences around a particular language or piece of software do not. I only know of one exception to that rule.
Some will, however, cover your hotel and airfare. You may have to ask for this, and they may only cover it if your company does not already. (Airfare may be capped, or may be limited to people traveling from the same country/continent).
As for whether work sponsors your or not, it depends entirely on your company and their relationship with speaking. I've been pretty lucky - even though I'm not in a role that explicitly requires speaking as part of my responsibilities[0], I don't have to use my vacation time when speaking at conferences. Not all companies take this same approach, though.
> How do you keep earning money when giving talks all the time ?
This is the main reason why I feel that all conferences should pay speakers, even a small amount. Preparing properly for a talk takes a lot of time, and providing speakers some share of the proceeds from a conference is a way of offsetting the amount of time it takes to prepare and give a good talk.
If more conferences paid speakers, the quality of talks would go up dramatically. However, I only know of one community-organized conference that pays speakers a share of the proceeds.
[0] ie, "Developer Advocate"
I've organised a few conferences covering different languages and platforms, and there's two things which prevent organisers from giving more than a token sum to speakers.
1) Most of the "proceeds" from a conference come from an abundance of sponsorship for that year. For the community-organised, non-profit conferences I've been involved in, the per-attendee cost is often much more than what we charge for tickets. (This also depends on the overall sentiment within the organising team. Personally, I'm for charging as high as reasonably possible and offering scholarships and discounts where needed.)
2) The sponsorship climate changes every year, depending on the marketing budget of the various local companies, and the conferences that are taking place in that year. It's very important for conference organisers to maintain a healthy balance for the next year, if only to cover the large deposits that we have to put down for the various vendors.
This I would expect, but doesn't the speaker typically get a pass to the conference in compensation? For some conferences that can mean quite a lot. I've seen conference prices in the thousands.
Are the passes typically single-day or for the whole event?
Many of those I know are consultants or freelancers, i.e. there's no employer to cover the expenses and no revenue is generated while they're doing speaking gigs.
While the marketing value of being a high-profile, sought-after speaker and expert certainly can't be underestimated, when speaking at a conference most of the time you aren't exactly speaking in front of your target audience in terms of marketing but in front of fellow designers, developers, you name it ...
Giving a talk at an event certainly is a great personal experience and a tremendous personal growth opportunity. However, I can't help but wonder if for a self-employed consultant regularly doing speaking gigs really pays off business-wise. Perhaps someone with personal experience in that area could shed some light on that?
I cannot stress enough how much some modicum of "fame" in a community greases the wheels of employment. You don't need to be at the Guido van Rossum level of famous to get this benefit: just being known and respected by enough of the "right people" helps enormously.
Software engineers often underestimate how much of our industry is built on "who respects you". If respected people trust you to know what you're talking about and to do good work, it makes it much easier to find good jobs and get well paid.
(For those who hate public speaking, similar benefits accrue to those who write great blogs or notable, innovative OSS projects.)
However, when I was an industry analyst, I rarely did speaking if I wasn't being paid for it. In general, we didn't find that travel and speaking "for the exposure" was a good use of time and money.
It depends on the conference and depends on the speaker, but generally 90% of speakers at technical or trade conferences are not paid or compensated in any way. At software conferences it's typically that the speaker will be going to the conference anyway paid for by their employer.
For in-demand speakers travel and lodging, and generally catered food at event dinners/lunches etc..., will be paid for at a minimum.
Highly recognized professional full time speakers will charge a speaking fee between 5-10k, with the top celebrity names commanding significant sums.
It's an entire industry, but as with everything most of the real money goes to the top 5%.
They may be sponsored (by the conf, the employer or a conf sponsor) e.g. have their transportation and lodgings paid or reimbursed, but AFAIK mostly not, at least for "community" conferences.
In fact specifically for the first conference TFA talks about (PyCon US) everybody pays up to and including the conference chair: https://us.pycon.org/2017/registration/ but attendees (especially but not solely speakers and tutorial presenters) can apply for financial aid, financed by both sponsors and entry tickets: https://us.pycon.org/2017/financial-assistance/
The boost to my resume, however, has helped me more than double my income over the last three years.
I've always been able to get my employer to cover airfare and hotels. It's good marketing for them too.
For a conference like Webstock (in New Zealand), the free travel to the wrong side of the planet can be worth thousands of dollars, and is part of the draw for many speakers.
We prefer to think of it as the other side of the planet, especially recently.
Sometimes you'll get travel covered and generally you get into the conference for free.
Luckily in my case my current employer is happy to cover travel/accommodation/time for speaking at relevant conferences and some time to help with talk preparation as well.
If you're lucky. When I speak at conferences, there are always some speakers who are there entirely on their own time and money (aside from whatever portion of travel expenses the conference picks up).
Even if you only care about hoarding money, conference talks easily add a multiplier to your future income.
It's fairly common for airfare and accommodation to be paid.
If you're talking about something work related, your company will likely be happy for you to do it on work time because of the exposure (and may well be willing to cover airfare/accommodation if the conference doesn't)
They might only be speaking for an hour, but I can assure you that giving a talk worthy of that slot and money takes a lot more than a single hour to prepare, even for the most experienced public speakers. You may be able to get away with that once or twice, but it's unlikely you'd be invited back to speak for any paying slot after that.
By itself, conference speaking is not going to be a good source of income for anyone at any level of experience. When you factor in the preparation time, it's always going to come out to far less than you'd be able to charge for hourly contracting (or even salaried work). The value in speaking at conferences comes from the ability to use the platform to deliver a message and to build your reputation (yours and your company's).
This also bugs me when people say "Oh, that person's given this talk at that conference before". Preparing a good talk is a lot of work, and after that's put in why should you not be allowed to give that talk more than one time?
Also only very few people watch conference videos. Giving the same talk a dozen times, by the 10th time maybe a handful of people in an audience of hundreds will have seen the talk before. I'm honestly surprised conferences still record the talks because I'm fairly certain it's not worth the money for them. (there are outliers to this when somebody gives the most amazing talk ever that gets watch millions of times, but how often does that happen?)
I'd much rather conferences invest money into a better experience for the attendees and speakers.
I’ll have to disagree here. Using PyCon US as an example since it ended recently:
1. My talk video has already been watched more than 650 times. I don’t think I had that many people in the room.
2. I rarely go to actual talks because as a European, being able to meet my American friends and being able to discuss things IRL is sadly a once-per-year issue. Open Spaces/BoFs are also more valuable IMHO by being present. IOW: now I’m back I’ve started to catch up by watching conf videos. :) As a speaker, I’d prefer people going to talks too of course. Last year I spoke to a 1/3 filled room and it sucked so hard I wasn’t sure I’ll submit another talk.
3. PyCon sells out. Always. It would be a pity to limit all the work to a small minority. Some great talk videos end up iconic too.
4. Plenty people can’t afford conferences at all. Be it money, job, or family responsibilities. Talk videos are a great way to democratize knowledge.
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat "Wat" https://creativemornings.com/talks/mike-monteiro--2/1 "F*ck You, Pay Me"
But it's funny that you thought of the exact same conferences when it comes to good recordings with large viewer counts.
Also I'd say I watch quite a lot of conference presentations. there are far too many conferences for me to get along to and in many cases only a small percentage of the talks are interesting to me, so it's very useful to be able to watch the specific talks online.
This is quite often true, but it hugely depends on the conference in question. The annual Chaos Communication Congress for example (well-known international IT security conference in Germany) records all of the talks, which usually have between 500-3k viewers at the venue, and the better ones usually get >10k views, with some top talks even topping 30k-50k over time, on the official recording page of the conference alone (there are quite often copies uploaded to YouTube and other outlets, and those amass similar numbers of views in addition). In addition there is usually a number of streaming viewers who watch the talks as they happen, in the figure of 500-3k.
In this case however the recording quality is generally very good, so that might also explain why other conferences with only mediocre recordings don't reach similar numbers of viewers. And the videos are released under a CC license, so sharing/reuploading/using them in education or similar stuff is all legal.
The WWDC talks most likely also reach high view counts, since many people would like to go to the conference but can't and the talks themselves as well as the recordings are usually of good quality.
1. Come up with a proposal, send it out to as many conferences as I can find.
2. Wait.
3. Most reject it. Some times (often, actually) all of them reject it. Go back to step 1 (You lose 3 or 4 months when you are waiting, not knowing if any will accept your proposal).
4. If one of them accepted, be overjoyed!
5. Tell myself I'll start working on the talk super early so I'm extra prepared.
6. Actually not start until 1 to 1 and a half months before the conference.
7. Be super stressed. Not get anything else meaningful done.
8. Day of the talk I am angry at myself for agreeing to do it when I get little out of it.
9. Do the talk, it goes way better than I expected! I didn't totally embarrass myself and people seemed engaged.
10. It's over! Oh my god, it's over! Thinking of all of the things I can get done now, I'm never giving another talk and putting myself through that again.
11. 3 or 4 months pass and I see people I know are giving talks and I get the itch to do it myself again... back to step 1.
This is one of the biggest reasons I started https://GroupBy.org.
I speak at a lot of conferences, and I was frustrated with the mystery of the abstract review process. I wanted anybody to be able to submit on any topic, at any time, and then get peer review from other speakers and attendees.
The abstract submission process is totally open - it's just a WordPress blog where folks can submit comments and talk directly to the presenters out in the open.
It really helps speakers understand why their abstracts aren't resonating, and how they can tweak their abstracts to improve.
There are only a few respected conferences where you get to see new faces. The rest usually cycle through their top speakers.
The worst is when you have the same white 5 males talking about diversity.
Does it really increase your salary or your network that much?
As jrauser said, though, the more I do them the less inclination I have, as it really does negatively effect my ability to achieve other goals. And the older I get the other projects become more important to me.
That said, having given some memorable talks[1] at high-profile conferences probably has helped my career more than a little bit.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv3BG8BSXbeFNfR2Zk4n8...
But that's not why I do it. It may sound trite, but I really do want to help others get better at stuff, and if I have something cool to share that I'm excited about, I'll go out there and share it.
If I help just one person in the room, that's a victory to me.
I also break my talk into logical chunks - say five or six sections. I practice each of those individually, timing them. This gives me an average for how long each section takes, so I have a schedule written down. This lets me know how far over or under my time allotment I am so that I can adjust on the fly, either adding some additional explanation to some areas or subtly truncating something.
I always know my "bail out" slide - if I end up running out of time, what's the "thank you!" slide number? If you simply type in that slide number in PowerPoint or Keynote, it will jump to that slide without fanfare. Don't ever tell your audience that you ran out of time to get to all your material, or flip through the slides to the end that they won't get to see. They'll feel like they were ripped off. (Also, make sure to structure your talk so that the special bonus material is at the end, so they're _not_ actually ripped off.)
Anyway, no need to remember the last slide number - just press the End key to jump there.
How do you prevent getting bored? And how do you prevent your audience to notice that you're bored giving the same talk for the Nth time?
These are actually my biggest problems giving presentations.
I get bored while practicing (and it’s getting worse as I get better) but the audience changes everything for me. In the absence of special talents, plowing through boredom and practice anyway is what separates good talks from mediocre ones.
I also don't find the rehearsals boring; in fact, around 24 hours before, I'm already starting to get excited about the upcoming talk. So I'm pretty amped up.
One challenge is multiple talks back-to-back. It's hard to keep that momentum up for several days in a row. I've definitely had occasion to give a great, high-energy talk and then give a talk a day or so later that just feels "off", especially in terms of my energy level.
How boring does it get for a painter to use the same kinds of brushes for all their paintings? Or for a musician to use the exact same instrument? It doesn't, because they are not what you focus on.
It may get boring to minimally refactor the same code twenty times -- the code is the focus of the action. When giving a talk about the code the focus is what you want to achieve with people, not with code.
If you are there and really only care about the thing you want to present instead of the people in front of you then sure, they will probably notice.
Disclaimer:
This goes along with the other sub-thread here about the value of recording talks. What I say above is more about talks that are about convincing and motivating people. I don't mean that as in "motivational speeches" at all, but an Apple keynote about their new products is in that category. You want to give people a "look behind the scenes", at the person, because technology fails if the people and/or organization(s) fail no matter the quality of the technology. If the talk is about the latest internal optimizations of the V8 Javascript runtime giving the talk once and then point to the recording, or even just a lengthy blog post may actually be better and the main reason there is a talk is "the conference is there anyway and why not". But that's the kind of talk I would put only minimal effort into and it still works, because I don't need to convince and engage people, only to inform them.
I had a talk where I showed how Elixir and Elm programming languages complement each other and someone in the audience asked what are we using Elixir for in our company. When I said that for payment systems he looked surprised, because he heard about "let it crash" in Elixir and he thought it is unusable for anything critical. That inspired me to talk about how we use Elixir for handling money.
I also answered questions on Stak Overflow for some time. Of course there are many typos or library quirks that are simply missed, but often you see a person that just entirely misunderstood the concept. This is also a target for talks. There might more people struggling with the same thing (especially if your question gets more views).
Pay attention to what surprises people when you are talking with them. If someone didn't know what you find obvious, there is a good chance more people don't know it. We have some kind of bias where we think that what WE know is common knowledge and automatically EVERYONE ELSE is smarter than us (because they know everything we know and some more that we don't). That is obviously not true :)
If you find a topic that surprised couple of people it means you have and idea worth sharing. It doesn't have to be novel! I often put quotes and references from blog posts that I read about given topic to show that this idea is not new at all! Old ideas are often not widely known or forgotten. They are perfect for conferences, because they might be crystalized over years, so it is easy to research them.
I've given close to 300 sessions at about 100 events over the last 10 years.[1][2] The top three things you can do are practice, practice, practice. There are nuances to the material that you don't even think about at this point. Saying it out loud makes you think about them.
There are jerks in the audience who will say "do you know about X?" which is semi-related but not completely.. you need to respond and either a) connect back to the topic or b) shut it down and redirect back to the topic.
When someone asks "that's great but I need to worry about B instead of A, what do I do?" you need to either punt to something like "catch me after" or "Oh, there's a setting/plugin/tool for that!"
Finally, there are transitions and a flow to the talk that you don't know about until you try it. And sometimes you'll need to look up things - about tools or even your projects - to refresh your memory.
Admittedly, I go lighter on practice because I was a theatre geek (only 3-4x out loud before the first time) but it is still the most important step.
In a different sphere, there are people who are naturally very funny but fail as professional comedians. There are people who are not naturally witty who do make good comedians, due to approaching it like a challenge of writing and performance.
I don't think you can simply say that people who are unable to wing it aren't worth listening to. Having said that, I do admire people that can wing it.
After having recorded 36 hours worth of video training courses, I've written over 150,000 words of scripts because explaining technical information in a concise way usually depends on thinking about how to word your sentences beforehand.
I'm really envious of people who can wing in depth tech talks amazingly well, but at the same time I'd also be surprised if those people even exist. Winging it "decently" and "amazingly well" are so much different.
amazingly well
A shameless plug: I'm working on a side project which aims to help tech speakers get the most out of speaking engagements: https://eventil.com/for/speakers
In peak irony, I’m actually considering to make it my next year’s talk. It’s too long for lots of people to read, but I think I could make an entertaining talk out of it.
I also rarely use slides nowadays. That helps a lot. Sometimes I use a whiteboard. The way I deliver keynotes and presentations is maybe best summed up (and definitely inspired by) this article from the late Pieter Hintjens:
http://hintjens.com/blog:107 Ten Steps to Better Public Speaking
I've been running meet-ups and speaking at and attending conferences of all shapes and sizes all over the world for years and I assure you, unless you're exceptionally talented and experienced at public speaking (which you may be), then a lack of preparation is painfully obvious to the audience.
I completely agree that building a bond with the audience is the key difference between a good talk and a great talk but to anyone relatively new to public speaking, I promise you that there's no such thing as too much preparation.
Some people call my style "storytelling" because that's the new buzzword, I guess. To me it comes very natural to be on stage and entertain the audience while delivering my content.
My main point is that speaking in public is not a one-size-fits-all thing. So what works for most doesn't have to work for all and vice-versa.
As long as the audience feels they learned something and were entertained, I'm happy.
However, like your guidelines, this is my personal one.
It’s obviously a matter of style, however I’d like to point out, that it’s not about extra work for me at all.
I probably spend as much time on my slides as you do (if not more), I just have a very different goal in mind and optimize for it relentlessly.
Bigger conferences also usually offer financial aid that is always worth trying.
1. Expect this gig to take a huge amount of time. As such, make sure that you allocate 1-2 weeks of full time work to prepare. Will it take this much time? Probably not, but its good to prepare anyways and know what you're diving into.
2. Speak at a conference as part of a much larger communications strategy. What does that mean? Its waaay easier to speak about something that you're already talking about on your blog, with customers or with your colleagues. Then, you can just develop that existing conversation into something that works well in front of a live audience. Developing an idea is a lot easier than creating an idea from scratch.
3. Test ideas first on your blog, HN or Twitter. Generally, what people want to hear and engage with at a conference is similar to what people want to read and engage with online. So, write a bunch of articles and share a bunch of articles, and see what people like from that.
4. Practice, practice, practice. Talking at a conference is like giving a performance. Would some violin player just wing it on stage? Definitely not, unless they have 10,000 hours of experience. So, practice giving your talk at home in front of the mirror. Hire someone to watch you while you practice. Per point one, this stuff takes time, and like any piece of work, you need to develop your skills.
I enjoyed it but was really nervous and had some serious imposter syndrome going on. I generally like giving talks but for me, it was a very different experience knowing that you were speaking for people who were paying to be there. The speaking invite allowed me to attend the conference for free though and I learned a lot.
My talk was basically a practitioner's experience of using/implementing a lot of different anti-phishing/anti-fraud techniques that people were deeply specialized in throughout other parts of the conference. I had what I hope, for others sake, was a very unique experience of combating a lot of fraud and seeing things come from all angles where a lot of larger targets will tend to deal with different parts of attacks in entirely different departments. I couldn't go deep on anything, but mainly got to share my experience.
That's a great way to do it if you are focusing on one specific thing at a year turnaround rate.
If however you are asked to present a wide range of topics then it doesn't work quite the same and you need to be better at improvising and speaking off the cuff.
I probably speak 15 times a year on 3 different topics:
Augmented Reality
Applied Machine Learning
Leadership
Each time I am asked to speak, I pull slides or structure from previous talks, and then update them with the latest from the field or my own constant research/learning.
Generally speaking though I don't start prep more than a week in advance - which is different than most people I think because I have so much experience here.
The day before, I will spend a few hours going through a routine where I just present several times to my hotel room. If it's an hour long presentation I won't typically walk through the whole thing each time, just the transitions usually. Once done I'll distill the points I'm making into bullets and write them onto a notecard. If there is a podium I'll use the notecard, if not then I just gotta memorize the bullets and go from there.
The reality here is also that a lot of conference speaking is about building momentum from previous talks and building relationships with the conference organizers. You need to have a great relationship with the organizer because things will go wrong and being able to show you can go with the flow is important.
Almost as important as what you present is being able to present it. Being prepared for contingencies (slide backups on dropbox, thumb drive, laptop with HDMI and VGA), knowing how to wear a pin mic, talk into a handheld mic, knowing how to use a clicker, doing pre-show prep for wonky videos or sound issues where necessary, know how to answer questions, give space for panel members to talk etc... are all parts of the equation that make you a good speaker or not and thus get invited to speak or not.
Most people miss all of these things or ignore them assuming that the staff has everything covered. Generally speaking conference staff are run ragged so anything you can do to help make their lives easier is appreciated and will be remembered.
I thought this was a really great list. Some big ones I like to call out:
#9: Travel - This gets me more than most things. I have on occasions bumped into other speakers completely unprepared for their travel for or for things that might go "boom" such as: laptop failure, presentation corruption, display adapters not existing (or breaking which is harder to prepare for) and my personal favorite Immunity Boosters. Hell yes. A coworker turned me on to these two years ago after coming down with the plague after speaking at a few too many events in a short period. Now its a must for me and whether its placebo effect or not I haven't gotten sick while traveling/speaking since.
#10: Showtime - No one is born a great speaker. Flat out no one. I know people who speak weekly at public events and they used to suck at it too. Don't be afraid/stress too much before a talk. That said, I have seen people bite off more than they can chew and give a first talk at a major tech event such as AWS's Re:Invent where rooms average 1k people. If you're going to choke at your first event, don't have it be that big/visible of a one. Start with local meetups!
#5/6: A big one that I always recommend is peer review your content before you even start dry runs. Presentations often live longer on sites such as Slideshare than they do in the minds of those who have seen them live. It is in sites like Slideshare that your spelling, grammar, and even design issues will stand out the most. Get someone who is detached from your presentation to read through it, maybe even two people, take that feedback and then move forward. For me, my wife who was a journalism major reviews almost all of my content despite not knowing much about the technical nature.
Also I would never drink coffee (or any caffeinated drink) before a talk, and rather wake up late to get a goooood night of sleep. Also eat really light.
> If you watch the talk, you may notice that I don’t do Q&As. That has two reasons
Never really understood Q&As after the talk. We can always have a private discussions or use different ways to ask questions.
I've spoken quite a few times and several different conferences/events and love it. However, the thing I struggle with most is coming up with a topic. I find it incredibly hard to think of something I believe people will find interesting. However, I expect this is simply down to lacking industry experience and not having spent extensive time working with any particular language/tool.
The timing of this article is excellent as I was just about to start the search for conferences I could share some of my knowledge with. I've spoken at universities, colleges, and small business conferences a bunch of times and my talks are usually well received.
However, I'm still not sure about is where to find conferences with audiences who might be interested in what I have to say.
