How do you make God laugh? Tell him your plans. How do you make pitchingtheworld’s older, better, but just as screwed up brother laugh? Same answer.
Yes, you should have seen me the other day as I told him that I was fast becoming a “Malcolm Gladwell-type figure”, a man who, yes, makes money through his writing, but also trousers up to $40,000 per time for public speaking. I had, you see, lined up a gig at Brighton and Hove’s City College to talk to the journalism students there about the pitching process. “This,” I told my brother “is the way to make money. Not books. You won’t make much money from a book anymore [for the record, I didn’t really know what I was talking about here]. This. Talks. Doing this.”
Doing “this” though, isn’t quite as lucrative as I had imagined. I was offered £25.00 for my talk. Out of this, I have to pay my own expenses and travel, including a return ticket from London to Brighton, though the course leader told me that if I “booked early enough” I could get a single for £3.00. I told her I’d think about it.
Yesterday I celebrated pitchingtheworld’s two month anniversary (I say celebrated, but it passed by without me noticing). If, two months ago, you had told me I would be writing for the Daily Mail, have trials lined up for a professional football club and be keeping this blog going with tens, sometimes hundreds of daily readers, I would have fallen over.
If, on the other hand, you had told me that I would be making roll-ups out of cigarette ends, eating beetroot (and only beetroot) for my lunch, grinding my teeth down to nubs over late payments and generally not pitching as much as I would like because the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook gives me the fear just looking at the fucking thing, then I probably would have said “Yeah, that sounds about right.”
Pitching the World 