The cost of speaking: ELT conferences as a freelancer

Recently, I’ve seen a number of posts and calls for papers for upcoming ELT conferences and had a few online exchanges with colleagues trying to encourage me to sign up for events coming up in 2024.

I love going to ELT conferences. As a freelancer who spends most of the year working alone at home, it’s a really good opportunity to catch up with ELT colleagues on both a social and professional level. It’s a good way to get a feel for what’s going on in the industry – sometimes just confirming what I’ve been seeing on social media, but occasionally throwing up new perspectives and information as well. And it’s a really important networking opportunity – maintaining contacts, making new ones, finding out who’s moved where in the ELT publishing merry-go-round, and talking to the right people about potential new projects.

Speaking at an event boosts all of those things. If your name’s in the programme, it flags to people you’re there and they’re more likely to seek you out, whether or not they come along to your session. It raises your profile and reminds people of your area of expertise. It also gives you a focus for the event.

However … attending and speaking at a conference is really expensive, not just in terms of the obvious costs of registration and travel, but the indirect costs too which are often far more significant.

The surfaces costs: The costs of registration can range enormously depending on the event. Sometimes speakers get free registration, but often they don’t. There’s travel and accommodation. Then you can add on all the miscellaneous costs of things like food and endless cups of coffee!

The prep: For me, this is the biggest ‘cost’ of speaking at an event. To prepare a new talk from scratch takes a lot of time:

·         initial time to come up with an idea and sketch out notes

·         putting together a proposal. Proposal forms vary – some are quite simple and just require a title and summary, others are more long-winded with abstracts and summaries and various other questions to be answered, all within strict word limits.

·         putting together your actual session, deciding on a structure, doing your research, designing your slides and deciding what you’ll say to go with each one.

·         rehearsing and working out your timings, then rehearsing again until you’re confident in what you’re going to say.

Nowadays, there’s often a requirement to do some form of promotion for your session. Increasingly, that’s a video which you’re told “won’t take long”, but in my experience, usually swallows up at least a whole morning – deciding what to say, getting set up, doing a few takes, uploading and doing a bit of editing, then posting or sending on the final video.

How long all this takes depends, in part, on whether it’s a completely new talk or a new version of a talk you’ve given before. Occasionally, I’ve been able to reuse talks several times, but that’s dependant on whether the session fits in with the theme of an event, whether it’s still up-to-date and relevant, and whether a sponsor is happy for you to repeat it. (I’ll come onto the issue of sponsors in a bit.) But I’d say anywhere between 15 and 25 hours’ prep is what I’d expect.

As someone managing a chronic health condition, I have to strictly limit the hours I spend at my desk each week, so prep for a conference can’t just be added on top of my regular working hours. Of course, that time should count as ‘proper work’ whatever your circumstances, but in my case, it literally replaces paid hours on other jobs. So, if it takes me a week or more likely, a week-and-a-half’s worth of hours, I lose that much paid income.

The time out: As a freelancer, I don’t get paid for the days I’m actually at the event, both the days there and the travel days. So that’s more lost income to factor into the cost.

Adding all of that together, counting the prep hours and the days out at my usual hourly rate, can easily come to the equivalent of a whole month’s income for a long event life IATEFL. Similarly, for a foreign trip with the extra travel and accommodation costs. And that’s not some theoretical calculation, it’s real lost income. If I give an unsponsored talk at IATEFL, that effectively means no income for April that year. And yes, I know it’s an investment in my business, but that’s a big hit when you’re already trying to support yourself on a part-time income.

Sponsors: All of which is why, where possible I try to speak on behalf of publishers. That doesn’t necessarily cover all the costs – amounts offered for prep rarely cover all the time and they usually only cover one night’s accommodation and one day’s ‘income’ – but it makes it more manageable. Speaking on behalf of a publisher though is contingent on you having recently worked on a project that they want to promote and on the talk fitting in with their marketing plans. Flagship new coursebook series are always going to attract more marketing budget than the kind of smaller, niche vocab materials I tend to work on!

Speaking for a sponsor also relies on the event accepting proposals for ‘promotional’ talks. I was looking at one event this week which specifically rules them out – which I understand, but also rules me out as a speaker.

So, yes, I’d love to come along to all those great events out there, but budgets for 2024 will likely mean just IATEFL and maybe one more.

Can everyone see that okay?

There’ve been a flurry of posts on social media over the past couple of weeks as people have shared news that their IATEFL proposals have been accepted for the Harrogate conference in April. I got mine too and although I won’t start planning my session until much nearer the time, it has got me thinking about an issue that’s been on my mind for a while.

Now you’ll have to bear with me a bit here, but the relevance of my story will gradually become clear …

I’ve been short-sighted since I was a kid and I’ve been wearing contact lenses since I was in my teens. It’s never been a big deal, just one of those things that I barely think about. Then a few years ago, I started struggling to read small print, like the teeny-tiny writing on the back of food packets, and I realized that as well as being short-sighted (not able to see things far away), I was starting to get long-sighted (not able to see things close-up). It’s really common in people around my age and like many of my friends, I bought myself a pair of cheap off-the-shelf reading glasses. I didn’t use them very much, except for reading those pesky cooking instructions. Anyway, when I visited my optician for a regular eye check, we chatted about it and he explained that if he updated my contact lens prescription (which slowly nudges up from time to time), then he’d make the close reading even worse. We agreed to compromise and leave the prescription as it was for the time being.

 

Over the next couple of years, I rubbed along okay, but I did start to notice that my ability to see certain things at a distance was getting a bit worse. It was mostly reading relatively small things a long way off, like the information boards in airports and train stations. And this is where IATEFL comes in … When I went to IATEFL in Belfast in May this year, I had a double whammy – not only did I take numerous trains to get there, and have to squint to read the boards, but when I got to the conference, I also found I couldn’t read a lot of presenters’ slides. It depended a bit on the size of the room and where I sat, but in some of the larger rooms, I had to give up even trying – they were just a smudgy blur.

It got me thinking about presentation slides and accessibility. I can’t have been the only audience member with less-than-perfect eyesight, and it did really change the experience of some talks. Here are a few of my reflections:

Background really makes a difference: It may be boring, but bold black text against a white background really was the easiest to read. Text on a coloured background, or worse still over an image, was really hard to make out.

Bigger is better: We all get told in basic presentations skills courses that we should use a minimum of 20-point text, but we don’t always stick to it. I know I’m guilty of it myself, especially when I’m presenting materials and want to show an extract from a book. It’s tough to show what you want without it coming out a bit smaller than you’d like. And well, corpus lines are just impossible! I’m not sure what the answer is here. I have tried having one slide that shows the design and layout of the material, but then a follow-up slide that pulls out just a couple of lines of text I want to focus on in a clearer format.

Reading from slides: I noticed that when I couldn’t see slides, sometimes it didn’t make any difference to following the talk, because they were just backing up what the presenter was saying. Occasionally though, the presenter would actually ask the audience to read something on a slide without reading it out for them. It’s a useful presenting technique that allows for a bit of a change of pace, gives the audience a bit of thinking time and allows them to mull something over without you talking over them, or maybe facilitates a talk-to-your-neighbour task. It’s also good for highlighting ambiguity or for word play where reading something out would give away the punchline. I don’t really know how you make those moments more accessible, except perhaps to ensure that anything your audience needs to read – as opposed to the stuff that just supports what you’re saying – is extra large and extra clear.

Anyway, getting back to my own story, I was back at my opticians recently and we agreed that maybe it was time to bite the bullet and fully correct my short sight. When I got my new prescription contact lenses, it was fabulous to have the world back in focus again! But as the optician had warned, it really threw out my close-up vision. It was no longer just the tiny small print, I struggled to read my phone and worse still, I could no longer see my computer monitor clearly. So, I’ve bought myself a second pair of specs so that I can have one pair that float around the house and another pair that stay permanently on my desk, and that I’m getting used to wearing full-time when I’m working.

I went for really big specs to use at my desk because the blur in my peripheral vision with my older, smaller ones felt distracting

 

Thanks to my updated prescription, I know that the slides at talks I attend in Harrogate are all going to be super-crisp, but I’m going to try to hang on to my blurry Belfast experiences when I’m designing my slides.

Coronavirus, cancellations and cashflow

Phew! It's been a stressful couple of weeks and I'm very pleased to have reached the weekend, albeit I'm still at my desk catching up after all the disruptions of the week.

Before I go any further I should say that I know lots of people have been hit much harder by the current situation than I have in all kinds of ways. However, I think we all need to let off steam to keep us sane, so I thought I'd share my perspective as an ELT freelancer trying to deal with the effects of the ongoing coronavirus outbreak.

You'd think that as a freelance writer who spends most of my time plodding away at my desk at home, I'd be barely affected. And at other times of year, that would be true. I just checked and my last non-desk-based bit of work was last August … OMG, that's a full 6 months without face-to-face contact with a work colleague! I should be really good at this self-isolation thing! However, we're just coming up to the main conference season and I had a whole load of face-to-face gigs planned in … and was really quite excited at the prospect of a bit of human contact.

Prague: The first casualty was a planned trip to Prague last week. I was due to be teaching a two-day intensive EAP course with a large group of students at a Czech university. The day before I was due to fly out, I got an email from my contact saying that a member of staff at the university had tested positive for coronavirus, the university had been shut and my course would have to be cancelled.

The situation was a bit discombobulating … I'd been quite keyed up about the teaching, which was a bit out of my comfort zone, so I'd completely over-prepared and then the sudden come-down left me feeling at a loss. Then as I came down from that, the realization of the lost income kicked in. I'd paid out on non-refundable flights which the university has said they'll refund, but the loss of the fee was something I could have done without, especially after having had no income at all through January (mostly down to a delayed piece of work) – I'd been banking on this income to get me back on track.

Covering the gap: As I was contemplating that loss and looking ahead to whether my next big gig, IATEFL, was also going to bite the dust, I got an email asking if I could fit in some writing work at short notice. They really wanted someone to start immediately on a job to be finished by the end of April.  I'm in the middle of another piece of work which is due to see me busy till the end of next week (at least), so I couldn't start straight away and I still had a week blocked out in my schedule for IATEFL. That would have given me just 4 weeks to do a 6-7 week job. I explained this to the commissioning editor, but said I'd give it a go anyway.

There followed a flurry of emails with the editors managing the project (two, because it's for two different levels) trying to work out a schedule for drafts and feedback etc. that would get both levels finished by their deadlines. At the same time, I was watching social media to see what was going to happen about IATEFL and working out different scheduling scenarios with and without a trip to Manchester … and at the same time trying to focus on my current work, aware that I needed to make progress more quickly to get that done.

The physical effects: The result was a physical mess. As some of you will know, I've suffered from chronic pain for many years. Over the past few months, I thought I'd finally cracked it and had been fairly pain-free (a subject for another post!). But with the tension building up in my shoulders from all the emailing to and fro, and uncertainty and worry over finances at the same time as trying to press on with some fairly fiddly corpus work … by Wednesday, the knots in my shoulders reached a critical mass and I was in so much pain I was in tears. And also feeling desperately deflated that all my hard work over the last few months to get myself physically in a good place had been undone.

IATEFL: Then yesterday, IATEFL was finally cancelled along with another conference I was due to be going to in June. Mostly that was a relief, both just to know what was happening, but also to free up a bit more time for the extra work I've taken on. But it also throws up a whole load more financial issues. I've already paid out for non-refundable accommodation for the week and for the registration fee. And as I was due to be speaking for a publisher, there was a fee + expenses attached. I'm yet to find out what I might get back or what might get carried over to next year (not very helpful when I'm struggling now) – that's next week's mess to untangle.

The financial hit: It's difficult to know exactly what the full financial impact will be until everything shakes out and I still have one more event in May which hasn't yet been cancelled, but I suspect will be. But at the moment, it's looking something like this.

That's a lot of income to lose in a short timescale, especially when my total average annual income is only around £25K. The extra work I've managed to pick up through April will cover some of that, but it's still going to be a tight couple of months.

Having reached the weekend, although I'm still working today, at least all the emails and announcements have stopped, so I can relax a bit and take stock. I know that most of the stress and hassle of the past couple of weeks has been short-term and I'm hopeful that the pain will be too and I'll soon be back on track physically. The financial impact will be more long-lasting, but I'll work that out somehow too. Tomorrow will be a full day off and although it's due to rain, I bought my partner a new waterproof coat for his birthday this week, so we'll be going out to splash in the puddles!

2018: Themes of the year

It's that time when you find yourself looking back on the past 12 months and ahead to the coming year. To be honest, 2018 wasn't the easiest year for me workwise. Through the first half of the year, I struggled with work as my chronic pain condition went through a particularly bad patch. This led to me taking two months off through the summer to rest and recover. It really helped from a health perspective, but meant a big financial hit. Then over the last few months of the year, I had the frustration of projects being delayed and cancelled, with more lost income and my cash-flow at less than a trickle!

Those things aside, it was a good year for ideas. Two of my highlights of 2018 were conference talks which reflect two of the themes of my professional year.

IATEFL: vocabulary learning and teaching

After many years of doing talks on behalf of publishers, I decided to submit my own proposal - Wordlists: snog, marry, avoid? - for IATEFL 2018 (summary here). When you put together a talk for a publisher, it's usually based on a project you've been working on, so apart from deciding on what angle to take, the content is generally fairly straightforward. Planning my own talk was a very different proposition. I had a few ideas floating around my head about vocab-related themes I’d like to tackle, but settling on a specific topic and then deciding exactly what to include was trickier. 

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been getting more interested in the principles behind vocabulary learning and teaching, and planning my talk sent me into a new flurry of reading and thinking (often in cafes and also on a rather lovely reading retreat). Vocabulary has long been my ‘thing’ and I’ve dipped into theory and research over the years and, of course, built up lots of accumulated knowledge from experience of working with vocab day in, day out.  I always felt my wider knowledge was a bit patchy though and I didn’t want to stand up in front of a roomful of ELT experts with a load of gaping holes in my arguments!  Although I know there’s still masses out there to read and digest, I do feel like I’ve now filled a few gaps and joined up a few dots. More importantly, perhaps, I feel like I’ve got something to say in my own right, which has been a bit of a revelation.

All my mulling over of vocab-related stuff led onto another talk about the principles I try to apply when I’m writing vocab materials at the joint MaWSIG/Oxford Brookes event in June (summary here) – another great event and lovely to get such a positive response from my peers, thanks guys :)

And I’ve still got lots of vocab-related ideas whirring around, so I think there’s more to come if I can just find the right outlets …

IVACS: corpus research

This time last year, I was at a bit of a turning point in my ELT career and I decided I needed to refocus on the areas of ELT that interest me most (see posts here and here). One of those areas was corpus research and it’s something that I have managed to get more involved in over the past year or so, with corpus research work for a couple of different publishers and rather excitingly, my first talk at a corpus linguistics conference in Malta in June.

Unlike the ELT events I’m familiar with, corpus linguistics conferences tend to be much more academic affairs. So, although I felt confident that I had some interesting stuff to talk about (summary here), I wasn’t 100% certain about the reception I’d get from an audience of academics. Much to my relief, no one questioned my methodology or picked up on my lack of a reference list! In fact, many of the people I spoke to were quite excited to meet someone who actually does corpus research ‘in the real world’ and I had lots of great conversations with a wonderful range of fascinating people. It’s definitely a world I’d like to stay in touch with and with a couple of new and interesting pieces of research under my belt this year, it’s something I’d like to talk more about … if I can find a way to fund it …

The cold, hard economics of it all

Although IATEFL and IVACS were highlights of my professional year, both were largely self-funded and, together with another couple of events, ate up a lot of cash which I didn’t really have to spare given the aforementioned patchy workflow and lack of income.

So this year, I’ve had to rule out going to events unless I have a sponsor to help out with costs.  Luckily, I already have two conferences– the English UK academic conference in London on 19 Jan and TESOL Spain in Oviedo in March – lined up with backing from event organizers/publishers and maybe another one in the pipeline for the summer.  I’ve had to cross another couple that I’d hoped to speak at off my list because I couldn’t get any backing, which is sad, but hey.

Perhaps more importantly for 2019, as well as the little inspirational blips that conferences provide, I need to refocus on the day-to-day work at my desk to pay the bills. January has got off to a busy start with one project finishing up and another quickie writing job in progress, but my schedule for February onwards is looking worryingly empty. I’d really like to see all my investment in reading and thinking and talking at events translate into interesting writing projects where I can put some of those ideas into practice.