Last night I spotted a tweet from Juliet McKenna linking to this article about the pressure on people to do things for free. Although the article is ostensibly about the tech industry, much of what it says applies to publishing too. The current discussion in the UK about paying authors to appear at literature festivals is an obvious connection.

And yeah, I relate to it. Almost everything I do outside the day job I am expected to do for free. And, as I noted to friends on Twitter the other day, I can’t even do things for “exposure” the way authors can. I am expected to do things for “the good of the community” and not take any credit for it, because taking credit would be exploiting the community for my own selfish ends.

But I’m not here to whine. I’m here to talk about one specific point that the article makes. It says, “We know that not paying speakers and not covering speaker expenses causes events to become less diverse.”

Now that’s true, and the article links to this lovely X-Men-themed post to make the point. However, it is very easy to come away from that thinking that paying speakers will make your event more diverse. In fact it might get you into even more trouble. Here’s why.

Once you get to the point of paying speakers, you start having serious budget issues. You have to get that money from somewhere, and that somewhere probably means your attendees. The only way you can get people to pay more to come to an event is to put on speakers that the public will pay a lot of money to see. That means having speakers who are famous, which in turn leads to having more straight cis white men, and paying them more than you pay the other speakers. Before you know it, you end up like UK literary festivals and are spending all of your money on celebrities and politicians who haven’t even written the books with their names on the cover.

So no, paying speakers alone will not make your event more diverse. The only way to do that is to have a specific policy to implement diversity by encouraging the sort of speakers you want to attend, and helping them financially if they need it. And you have to be prepared to swallow the drop in attendance and revenue that may bring. Because when it comes down to it, this is the real problem.

https://twitter.com/tadethompson/status/692073206321123328