The Editor (2)
Once I'd settled on my two editors, I held out the employment contracts I'd drawn up with Byeong-jin's help.
They were crammed with all the usual clauses, and the last section covered pay. A few items shaved something off here and there, but nothing you wouldn't find at any other company.
Naturally, the two of them stared at the contracts I'd offered as if they were something radiant.
And yet Se-hee's mother, who had been quietly studying the pages, suddenly looked startled.
"Oh—Suhwan. You're really giving an incentive like this?"
"Yeah. Is it a little small?"
I looked at her, a flicker of worry crossing my face. The incentive I'd set could, depending how you looked at it, be called modest. I'd decided to pay 2 percent of the revenue that accumulated over the month following a video's upload date.
Running the numbers against where things stood now, if the two editors split it, the incentive came to roughly three hundred thousand won a month each. I'd picked that figure expecting it to grow once I had editors and could upload more videos.
I was watching her and wondering whether it really was too small, when she shook her head.
"Oh, it's not that. I just... I never actually thought I'd get to receive a real incentive."
"What? I put it in the job posting, though..."
"Maybe it's because I worked at a broadcasting station. You don't know, do you, Suhwan? How much a station PD actually makes."
"I've heard the rough version. Unless you're a star PD, a hundred-million-won salary is a dream you don't even get to have."
Se-hee's mother let out a light laugh.
"Ahahaha—I have no idea who spread that story. I've been at the station for a little under twenty years. How much do you think I was making?"
"Uh..."
I had no answer. Part of me figured twenty years in had to mean a pretty decent salary—but then again, she'd applied to be my editor for an offer of fifty million won, so maybe that wasn't it.
"My base was around thirty-five million won a year. Low for twenty years on the job, right? The allowances made up for it, though. Overtime pay. Most of the time I made more in overtime than I did on base."
Then how many hours was she even working? I was appalled. If the overtime outstripped her base pay, I couldn't begin to imagine the hours. And the editor my own age looked every bit as stunned.
"But none of that pay included an incentive. No matter how well a broadcast did, no matter what the ratings were, almost nothing extra came in. Once a year they'd toss you a million won, maybe two, and that was it. If your rank was low, half the time you didn't even get that."
Little money for the work, and nothing coming back no matter how hard you worked—her grumbling made it plain enough why she'd walked out of the station and applied to edit for me.
Even so, I wondered if it was really enough to make someone leave a stable job like broadcasting. I couldn't hold the curiosity in, and when I asked, the answer that came back was a little hard to believe.
"It looked like I was about to get promoted into management, so I just walked out. I really don't suit management. They call it a promotion, but you lose a lot on the allowance side, so your pay tends to go down, too."
Hearing she'd left because she didn't want the promotion left me a little dumbfounded, but it wasn't something I couldn't understand.
Something similar had happened at the company I worked for before I awakened as an Animal Communicator. Thinking of the man who'd made department head and thrown a tantrum because travel expenses stopped the moment you hit that rank, it wasn't such an unthinkable thing to do.
"Also, I'm actually a fan of yours. With that in mind, could I get an autograph and a photo?"
"Ah—oh! Me too, please!"
The moment Se-hee's mother asked, Park Young-sang—the editor my own age, sitting beside her—shot his hand into the air in agreement.
I let out a short laugh at the sight, signed for both of them just as they wanted, and even took the photos.
"Hehehe, I have to go brag to Se-hee. Do you know how much she went on about meeting you? 'Mom didn't get to see him, Mom didn't get to see him'—she needled me so much. If she weren't my own kid, I'd have thrown her out."
Whether she truly meant to brag to Se-hee or not, she tapped away at her phone. It started buzzing as message after message came in, plain to see.
"Se-hee's about to die of envy. Ahahaha!"
She seemed thoroughly delighted at having teased her own daughter, breaking into a bright, sunny smile.
I answered with a light laugh of my own and collected one copy each of the contracts the two of them had filled out.
"I'll be counting on you from here on. Both of you."
"Don't worry. We'll make sure you never regret paying wages like these."
"Please look after me as well, Suhwan. I mean—boss?"
The three of us shared an easy laugh and shook hands.
With the contracts firmly settled, I put them straight to work.
"From now on, you'll come in here to edit. Of course, depending on the situation, working from home is fine too. Still, it'll probably be easier to do it here whenever you can. I'm planning to keep all the footage and source files stored on site."
At that, the two of them nodded as if a commute-style arrangement were no problem at all.
"For now, Young-sang, I'd like you to focus on the videos I've set aside as daily vlogs. They'll mostly be the animals looking like they've short-circuited, or just playing around."
Young-sang gave a small nod. The sample he'd made when he applied had been built from footage of the animals' everyday lives in the first place.
Once I'd handed him his work, I found Se-hee's mother staring straight at me—a look that all but asked what I was going to assign her.
"Se-hee's mom, you'll..."
"You don't have to call me that. PD Oh is fine, if that's easier. Or Auntie Yeon-hee."
Se-hee's mother—no, Auntie Yeon-hee—smiled gently and told me there was no need to treat her so formally. I was the employer paying her, so there was no reason to stand on ceremony.
It wasn't going to cost me anything, so I decided to speak more comfortably, just as she'd asked.
"All right. Then, Auntie Yeon-hee, I'd like you to focus on the slightly more special videos. It'll mostly be ad spots, and videos we plan out separately. At first I was going to have every editor I hired just take turns on whatever came in, but since you came out of broadcasting, I decided to have you handle those on your own."
"Ads? You've already got one in?"
"Yeah. It's nothing huge, but they asked me to film a promotional video for MyTube. We're still in discussions, technically, but it's at the point where all I have to do is say yes."
While I'd been choosing editors, one advertising offer had come in.
I meant to leave that video with Auntie Yeon-hee. A former broadcast PD would have handled the sort of thing that went with product placement, and there was no reason not to trust her with it.
And she herself looked plenty confident.
"An ad video is easy. I've edited a lot of product placement myself."
She was showing a great deal of confidence, and that confidence was deeply reassuring.
"Then I'll let you know once there's a schedule for the shoot. Until then, edit from the footage I set aside, the same as Young-sang."
"I will. Oh—but could you tell me about the product? Even just so I can start coming up with ideas."
She added that it was better to edit differently depending on the item, and I agreed to send her the details of the ad by email.
Having split the work between them, I assigned their seats right away.
I'd prepared the spaces back when I decided to hire two editors. Two monitors apiece, high-performance computers—everything editing required was already there.
"I'll be counting on you for the videos we put up on MyTube."
"Just trust the two of us!"
Auntie Yeon-hee called it out, bursting with confidence, telling me to put my faith in her and Young-sang alone.
"That's right. Please trust us. We'll make absolutely sure you never think the wages were a waste."
"You two sound dependable."
Watching them, so full of confidence, I felt steady. And just as that confidence promised, what the two of them produced was remarkably good.
These weren't videos in the style I'd been making, simply cutting a piece here and pasting it there. The transitions were smooth, and there wasn't a scrap of filler in the content.
Even the subtitles translating what the animals said had actual design to them, nothing like the white letters on a black bar I'd been using.
Whether it was the power of having editors or not, people's reactions improved enormously, and those reactions showed up at once as revenue. Taken video by video, even on a single day's numbers, the new uploads were earning more than the old ones.
A day after the editors' videos went up, revenue had climbed more than 20 percent compared to the existing ones.
Thoroughly satisfied with the two of them, I set about handling the advertising work that had come my way.