How Being A Tour Guide Taught Me About The Financial Value of Culture
This letter will be the last one for now, as I am taking a month off to take care of my parents, who had a minor accident but need my assistance. It’s been a month I am in France to help support them while working, so it hasn’t been easy. I have been juggling between helping them, working, and Le Journal Curioso, so I want to take a breather here before I start feeling too overwhelmed. I have objectives for Le Journal Curioso, and I know that if I want to achieve them, I need to pause to come back stronger. I already have a new section with interviews I need to transcribe and letters’ drafts waiting to be finished, so I’ll be missing it here! But, dear Curious Minds, know you are all in my heart! I am glad of the bonds I am creating here, so please bear with me until January 3rd 2024.
Meanwhile, I am leaving you with my last letter of 2023 below. I hope you’ll enjoy it!
ps: if you haven’t yet, feel free to peruse my archive.
As a student, I was a tour guide in an XVth-century castle near Paris. By day, I lived an almost monastic life for two seasons, guiding the visitors through the castle and French History. By night, instead, I studied for my exams and slept in the castle’s tower. Besides the bats’ hunt when they triggered the alarm, this unique experience taught me a lot about the financial value of culture.
The castle's owner was a slender, blue-eyed French-Swiss Earl who spent two hours on the phone interviewing me. To this day, it still counts as one of the most challenging interviews I have ever done. Besides being a khâgneuse - a student in the last year of khâgne, or literary prep school preparing for one of the oldest humanities French schools - my CV attracted Monsieur de P. because I spoke three languages and worked every summer since I was 18. He unexpectedly switched many times to English during the interview, asking me about historical facts, what I knew about the Renaissance period, how I would approach the visitors, etc. He was testing me on all fronts. And I passed. During the first two weeks, he would discreetly appear during my visits to check if I was doing a great job. It was my trial period. Again, I passed.
Monsieur de P. inherited the castle from his grandmother. It was the place he spent his summer with his family when he was a child. As an adult, he kept coming with his children on the weekends or during the low season. However, someone inheriting a castle can consider such an estate a mixed blessing because of maintenance and hidden costs, and taxes. But despite all this, Monsieur de P. was attached to this castle and wanted to keep it, so turning his private home into a visitable (and rentable) one was the method he found to finance its maintenance and make some profits.
The Château de F., a certified Ministry of Culture historical monument, was 2100 square meters with a 17 hectares jardin à la française. Yearly maintenance costs for such a castle can go from €20.000 to €30.000. Meanwhile, other costs include hiring specialised experts (e.g., woodworkers, interior decorators, architects, etc.), the castle’s wardens, and property charges. Regarding the last point, land tax can be deducted:
by 50% if the castle is not open to the public
by 100% if the castle is open to the public and the visits are free
by 75% if the castle is open to the public and the visits are charged
Though I researched a bit to refresh my memory, these are pieces of information Monsieur de P. gave me as soon as I was hired because he considered it necessary that I knew what owning a castle entailed to grasp the importance of my role in the grand scheme.
In 2009, France's gross monthly minimum salary was around €1337,70. Monsieur de P. paid me 1500€ per month and added a bonus of 500€ each month. So I took 2000€ home, but it didn’t stop there. Visitors left tips, and I was allowed to keep them. In a good month, I received 1500€ of tips; in a “bad” one, it was 800€. The notes visitors left allowed Monsieur de P. to gauge:
what visitors said about the state of the castle
how well (or not) the garden was taken care of
if visitors complained about the visit price
the quality of my visits
For Monsieur de P., one could have the most beautiful castle. Still, if the guide didn’t know how to add value to it through knowledge and storytelling, visitors wouldn’t remember the place’s beauty but the underwhelming tour because, in his words, ‘the guide [is] the castle’s image and voice.’
So, in his eyes, all the above contributed not only to the castle’s prestige but also to getting more visitors and generating more tickets sold.
Monsieur de P. became, unbeknownst to him, the one and only finance mentor I ever had. I grew up without a financial education, and if I understood culture’s value for societal, personal and professional growth, I didn’t grasp the business side behind it. It isn’t something we are taught.‘Consuming’ culture is, after all, different from contributing to making it.
‘Culture, said a Japanese teacher, is what remains when men have forgotten everything.'
Notes et maximes (Notes and maxims), by former French prime minister and President of the National Assembly Édouard Herriot
This quote my father constantly repeated to my brother, and I was his motto. Each weekend and holiday was dedicated to driving the country to visit historical sites, watching movies and documentaries, and reading books or comics related to History or literature. If my father taught me about the importance of culture, Monsieur de P. was the one who taught me about the importance of culture’s financial worth. By paying me more than the minimum wage, giving me a bonus, and above all, letting me into his world as a castle owner who not only wanted to keep his beloved childhood home but knew how to turn cultural value into financial worth, Monsieur de P. taught me an invaluable lesson.
[Side note, being a tour guide helped pay for a part of my university tuition, the deposit of my flat and its rent for half of the year. And all this is because culture has a value.]
It's a pity that I didn’t bring that mindset into my career. When I started as a Product Writer, I was paid €25.000 per year, and when I lost my Sub-Editor role in London, my yearly salary was £33.000 (around €37.720 today). I have always negotiated my salary, considering the cost of living in my city of residence and looking at how seniority affects one’s wages on sites like Glassdoor or Indeed. Finally, I weighed in my role with others within the fashion industry, which taught me fashion professionals were notoriously underpaid. And I was no exception.
I believe I didn’t question why I was underpaid because, in the fashion industry and beyond, there is this idea that anyone can write. So, why would our salaries be competitive if anyone can do it?
I wasn’t trained as a journalist or writer. Still, in France, students with a ‘literary’ profile like mine often spend hours reading literature classics, studying the authors’ biographies, analysing their works’ structure, and writing essays. In brief, I was trained to write from a young age. But I didn’t realise it until I started my Instagram profile, The Little Black Diary (The LBD), in my late twenties. I found myself adapting what I learned about the different writing genres I studied to Instagram, a platform not meant for writers and readers.
‘A written photo album & a podcast about the African diaspora in Europe.’
That’s what The LBD bio said. And indeed, I used the feed and the stories as if there were interactive albums/books. Meanwhile, I wrote scripts for the podcast.
Working on that passion project revived Monsieur de P.’s learnings. Through the DMs, comments, and reactions to my posts and stories, I began understanding the cultural value of my Instagram. It was both educational and informational while deeply personal. That’s what people loved about it. So the first trigger was pulled.
In the educational system, I evolved in, studying humanities meant becoming a writer was the coolest thing. Yet nobody taught me how to make a career out of writing. Between 2018, the year I launched The LBD, and 2023, I wrote a lot for free or was paid here and there. 2021 was the second trigger that revived Monsieur de P.’s learnings when I created a profile here on Substack as a reader. Seeing journalists, writers, illustrators, and overall creatives on the platform creating community and earning money from their writing has encouraged me to think about how to turn the cultural value of the topics I write about into financial worth.
In this light, my priority will be fostering community, so I hope Le Journal Curioso will become a place where you feel free to engage with me and each other. On a platform like Substack, I believe culture is even more valuable because readers are proactive and contribute to making writers tackle a topic they are familiar with from an angle they might never have considered. That is why I plan to use the Chat to create conversation there. If you’d like to participate, download the Substack App on Google Play or the App Store.
I have identified that just like The LBD, Le Journal Curioso is educational, informational, and deeply personal. So I am even more convinced that letting people access my articles is essential; hence I will put articles older than two weeks under a paywall starting in January. This will apply to new letters, I will leave the first one I wrote free because I believe they will give an idea of how I started here and can contribute to new readers becoming part of Le Journal Curioso. Meanwhile, I think two weeks is a reasonable amount of time to let everyone know about a new piece, read it, and decide to receive and support the newsletter.
Finally, for 2024, I aim to reach $500 gross annualised revenue. It might seem tiny, but if I reach it, it will mean at least one person would have subscribed to the yearly subscription each month. I try to be very pragmatic about it as I understand financial growth is not linear on Substack. Nonetheless, I already have some clear objectives as I’d like the newsletter to pay for eventually:
my rent
my driving license
Having this written in my newsletter diary is what helps me stay focused.
What makes you want to support a cultural project financially? What makes you want to offer your support to a writer on Substack?
This is a really clear statement of intent. The experience you had working at the castle seems so instructive in many ways.
I was talking to some fellow Substackers recently about the challenge of working out the value to your own creative work. It doesn't help that in so many lines of creative work, enthusiasm and passion are expected to be used as stand-ins for compensation.
I took a similar approach when I started my newsletter and made it 50/50 paid/free from the outset, contrary to Substack's suggestions.
I have a belief that the longer research articles I write have a real value (whether educational, practice enhancing or for want of a better term "thought-leadership" <<< cringey phrase!) for those working in design research, and for that reason there is a price attached to them.
Too often (especially in professional environments) value is the mistakenly equated to "time-spent" so the argument will always end be to reduce time spent on creative work to make it more profitable!
Coming every week to write is bloody hard work! I think it's easy to get sucked in because we're always being told that we have to show up. Still, we need to show up for ourselves first, don't we? What I meant by focused is that it's cool that you have set some goals for yourself, but of course, those are always a way to stay focused. 😊