Pay in hope

"If we don't sell to many of these things, we might just break even." 
                                               -Groucho Marx

If you search through duotrope.com, you'll find that professional pay for a fiction writer is a nickel per word. Kij Johnson, and accomplished fantasy author, mentioned to me at a writers' workshop in 2002 that periodical pay for fiction writers hasn't changed in thirty years. In fact, writers' are so used to seeing a nickel a word as "professional pay" that publishers almost have no incentive to change it.

I've just about completed a novel that's 194,000 words long. I probably put close four to five thousand hours into it. Now I was learning and didn't know what I was doing, and I hope I'm getting faster. Even so, if I were paid a nickle per word my total, gross pay per hour would come out to $2.15. It's almost better it's a fanfiction and doesn't pay anything.




In the nineties, a journeyman genre writer could expect to get $5,500 for a first novel. I don't think prices have changed that much, but with the market in such flux, I don't think researching it would be productive. Then, they probably would put in 600-700 hours. Give or take, that would have come out to about $8-9 an hour, gross. After taxes with double social security and the net pay looks very meager. Especially when you have to put labor into selling and promoting it, with no guarantee.

The rare, lucky jackpot stories of Stephen King or J. K. Rowling notwithstanding, (because skill is just something you use to enhance your luck) fiction writing is like realizing you're gay in this society: there's no rational way you'd do it if it's not engraved in your psyche. You don't do it as a shrewd career move, and if you had a choice about it, publishers would pay more to keep you in it. They know you're insane and take advantage.

Of course, I hope I could turn this into a living, and the best way to do that is to produce the best work I can as fast as I can. But right now, the job pays mostly hope, hearts instead of dollars. Even so, I'm happy doing it. I wouldn't do anything else, can't do anything else, really. With better luck, and a sound mind, I would have been doing it decades ago, which I'll explain in an upcoming longer post.