While I was out, John Scalzi had an interesting post about the changing economics of short story writing. Back in the day, Robert Heinlein made a living selling stories at a penny a word:
As I was reading this again I was curious as to what at penny in 1939 would rate out to here in 2007, so I used the Consumer Price Index Calculator from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis to find out. Turns out that to you’d need fifteen cents in today’s money, more or less, to equal the buying power of that 1939 penny. Dropping Heinlein’s $70 into the calculator, you find that it was the equivalent of $1,034.89 today. Which is, you know, fairly decent.
It’s also entirely out of the reach of today’s beginning science fiction writers — and for most of the established writers as well. Analog, which is the current incarnation of Astounding, pays 6 to 8 cents a word for stories up to 7,500 words, and a beginning writer should expect to be on the low end of that pay scale. So a 7,000 word story — the length of “Life-Line,” Heinlein’s debut — will bring in $420. For those of you wondering, that’s $28.41 in 1939 dollars. One reasonably wonders if Heinlein would have bothered writing for a living if that were the sum he could have expected to get from the top magazine in the field.
There’s a good deal of discussion in the comments, as well, most of which is well worth reading.
This was particularly interesting to me because back in May, when Jennifer Ouelette visited campus, she talked to our students about life as a freelance science writer. She was asked about the economics of writing science stories for magazines, and said that, basically, if they didn’t pay at least a dollar a word, it wasn’t worth the effort.
She also noted that book writing required the most effort for the least reward, saying something like “It’s a real kick to have someone give you $20,000 for a book, but remember, that takes a year to write.” Books are fun, but shorter writing is what pays the bills.
I’m less clear on the typical range of novel payouts for SF (other than John’s humorous taxonomy), but it seems almost like genre fiction and non-fiction are mirror images– from various comments online, it looks like novels are the best way to get paid for SF, while short writing offers the best return for science writers. If you can manage it, the optimal strategy is probably to write short non-fiction to pay the bills, and do your novel-length SF writing as a sideline.
“What about blogging?” you ask. Well, I’m much too lazy to actually tally up the words that I write in a month, but a Fermi-style back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests that I get Heinlein money. That is, not-adjusted-for-inflation Heinlein money– about a penny a word. Which is anomalously high, for reasons that aren’t worth getting into.
Now, the blog has its own rewards, and the monthly check from Seed is a nice bonus, so I’m not knocking it. But it’s a good thing I’ve got a day job…