One correction/clarification from recent grunking – What media folk call “New Broadcasting House” is actually in London – it’s the shiny new building off Portland place. People refer to it as NBH and the 1930s older building next to it as Old BH, which is important if you’re going for interviews as you need to know which entrance to go to. BBC Breakfast and a lot of other stuff moved up to Salford, but a fair bit of radio and TV is still in London.
For talking head interviews, the BBC do pay a disruption fee if you have to go into the studio (it’s tit - £50 and you don’t always get it – and may not get anything for local radio/tv) but they should also pay travel/send a car for you. Other channels can pay a bit more (still not the big bucks – like £100-£200 if you’re lucky).
However, I do seriously take issue with her use as any kind of ‘expert’, and also that she needs hours to prepare for every interview. Surely after 10 years of campaigning on this stuff she should have a good grasp of the key stats and messages, and a few case studies up her sleeve? Yet every interview is just a bit ranty and unfocused. Apeing Martin Lewis by cranking out a few tears on Today ain’t going to cut it for long, honey.
I can see why she wouldn’t want a TV career – it’s hard work and involves a lot of networking, pitching and disappointment. Pilots pay poorly (if at all) and you probably won’t get paid much (if at all) for doing development work on pitches. More importantly, she has very little natural presenting talent – which you can improve a lot by practice on YouTube or Insta, but that also requires effort and consistency. Doesn’t necessarily need a lot of fancy kit to start with, but it does need graft and thought. And even more importantly, she has already had great media opportunities but fucked them up by being difficult to work with and not really delivering the goods.
Then there’s the books. I can tell you for a fact that books do not earn as much as you would think. But while some publishers will offer writers an initial royalties-only deal, generally established writers with agents get an advance for their next book – this might range from a few thousand to £££££, depending how famous you are and how good your agent is (after all, this is how agents get paid…). You then don’t get any further royalties until your book has ‘earned out’ (ie your publisher has recouped in sales what they paid you for your advance). The catch is that the advance might sound big but doesn’t all come at once. Usually you get a chunk on signing the contract, then a chunk when you submit the manuscript, then a chunk when the hardback comes out, and a chunk when the paperback comes out (if that’s how they’re doing it). You can also get extra payments for translations along the way.
General public speaking gigs often pay badly too, especially if you’ve got a book to flog. You might only get a couple of hundred quid even for something that sounds quite prestigious like the Hay Festival. You usually do get travel and accommodation paid (although often only 1 night accommodation). I strongly suspect her Edinburgh talks were booked to coincide with the obv delayed publication of her next book – what a wasted opportunity.
Finally, writing columns and op-eds also doesn’t pay that much, especially if they’re small and you’re not a massive name.
More generally, assuming that she doesn’t actually want to get “a job, any job” then the kind of career and lifestyle she seems to be wanting (writer, speaker, campaigner etc) relies on building your personal brand, especially if you want to do corporate partnerships.
Social media is an important part of that (I guess she classes all the time she spends on Twitter in the 100 hours a week?) but your public online persona is professional. You can have fun, talk about your life but be really careful what you say, especially if (as seems to be the case here) you are given to fabrication.
She comes across as a compulsive fabulist, just says anything that comes into her head and seems true enough to be plausible or gets her out of the current scrape (basically like Donald Trump) some may be deliberate eg trying to Google hack hoops with the hula hoop nonsense, other times it’s almost a survival reflex. Getting into twitter fights, badmouthing others in the industry, posting wildly inappropriate stuff about getting Burgered is such a bad look.
If this career is really destroying her mental health, as she seems to imply, and she’s howling with frustration about her financial stability, then she needs to step away, shut down her social media accounts, and get a bleeping job. Nobody is making her pursue this career except herself. And if she wants to do it, then there is so much she could be doing to help herself.
Then there’s the money. I just don’t understand her finances as a self-employed person or a business owner. Lots of things that you buy for work, either as a self-employed person or through a business, are tax-deductable – things like a phone, laptop, airpods (needed for interviews), personal grooming and stage/TV clothes, meals while you’re away working, I’m sure things like food, spoons for photoshoots etc etc etc – basically, anything that you can legitimately claim you need for work that you wouldn’t otherwise be buying. If you’re a VAT-registered business, you even get the Vat back! I don’t understand why she’s not open about this – clearly having a iPhone is fine if it’s mostly for your work, but don’t whine about being on your uppers and get defensive when people point out your nice stuff and ask questions about where your money is going. I do think the fact her company has folded is a Bad Look and a bit suspicious, it either smacks of wanting to keep her income hidden from the public, or total admin chaos (or both).
I just don’t understand what the duck she’s doing in these alleged ‘100 hour weeks/20 hour days’, and why she isn’t getting paid for it or pushing back. It’s clearly very poorly thought-out about how she is using her time and where she’s adding value – by this point she shouldn’t be having to say yes to every unpaid request, especially as she says she pushes back on it. I’m very strict about how much time I allocate to charity/low paid projects, and make it clear when I get requests that I don’t work for free. Like Nigella, I find it unfathomable how she hasn’t managed to convert all those books, talks, appearances and 0.5 million social media following into a sustainable career. “I’m working so hard but I still barely have any moneeee” is just a bullshit excuse by this point – you don’t have any money because you’re dreadful at managing it. And no, ADHD/chaos brain isn’t a good enough excuse. She is not valuing her time or energy, or that of those around her, if she continues to push a mad hamster wheel of unproductive activity.
In an ideal world it all works together – books, plus media appearances, plus writing, plus speaking, plus #sponcon and partnerships, consulting fees etc and Patreon can add up to a really decent living. It is fine if she earns money, and it’s fine if she earns money from big name brands if she then explains that she’s doing it in order to do the charitable stuff or demonstrably giving it away.
Patreon is the single most obvious someone like her with a good following and name recognition could be earning a decent, sustainable living. It could have been a stable source of income and community that she owned and controlled but she’s fucked it by doing nothing to nurture it and not delivering. Absolutely mental. What a colossal waste of good will and other folks’ money. I’m very glad people are starting to ask questions and demand refunds. She had an amazing opportunity with that, and has just fucked it at every turn.
One clarification on her blog. More technical fraus than I can comment on whether her basica wordpress site is really borked beyond belief, but looking back over many posts, I suspect everything from the copyright disclaimer just above [AD BREAK CREDITS ROLL] onwards, including the tip jar beg, is inserted into every post automatically from a template. So she can claim she didn’t deliberately rattle the jar on her HH2 blog, as she didn’t add an overt ask into the text she wrote, but it is still there nonetheless. It would not be difficult to edit that or change it to a Patreon link – and if she can’t do it herself then I’m sure there’s a hundred neckbeard web devs who would love to (OH HAI Russ!).
However, one of her biggest issues is that she’s actually quite tit at what she does.
If she was smart, she’d lean into the ‘Home economics’ thing – properly costed weekly/monthly/yearly shopping and cooking plans including energy, toiletries, other household consumables, bulk buys, even treats! Instead we get dishonest £20 “weekly shops” (plus £50 in the cupboard/freezer) and recipes/notrecipes that are lists of ingredients with 1p for a spoon of sugar, tuppence ha’penny for half a tomato plus a can of rinsed economy hoops (25p) nonsense.
More importantly, her grasp of nutrition is absolutely terrible, verging on dangerous. She has absolutely no business providing advice on cooking and eating for people struggling on low incomes when her recipes demonstrably don’t contain enough calories to feed normal humans and unrealistic pricing scenarios (weighing an anchovy, FFS – how much does the whole tin cost and what else can you do with them??). If you’re on a low income, you should be working on maximising calories, nutrients (protein and vits/minerals), flavour and satiety per £, especially for growing children. There’s nothing I see in her recipes or portion sizes to suggest that she thinks about that at all. Who on earth are they really for???
It feels to me like she’s just using the whole endeavour as a way to continue her eating disorder but focusing on weighing and costing rather than calories. She tries to get out of things like the shopping basket debacle by saying “well this works for me, you do you”, but when you have 0.5m followers and seven cookbooks to your name, you are an expert and what you say is taken to be advice.
Also, she’s objectively a terrible cook on a technical level – putting things in cold oil, boiling stuff that doesn’t need to be, odd flavour combos, no consideration of texture. She strikes me as someone who doesn’t actually like food, certainly doesn’t test her recipes as much as she says (is it triple tested, or ‘one and done’??)
Finally, the “Fit and active” vs “multiple disabilities” thing really grinds my gears. I appreciate that health conditions wax and wane (I also have an incurable health condition with variable symptoms) but the way she’s crumbly and in pain for sympathy one minute and yomping about the next minute boasting about how fit and active she is is hugely offensive to people who live the reality of disability and chronic illness. I will not get on to the fact that she is clearly weaponizing her recovery/sobriety/12 steps, as other fraus have more than enough Thoughts on that one.
Like whether or not she learnt violin at school or wasn’t posh enough she’s taking the place of at least one actually working class women in the media? 
