Helen DeWitt links to a blog by John Scalzi pointing out that today’s science fiction magazine writers get the same rate–6 cents per word–at F. Scott Fitzgerald did tor his short stories in 1920. After correcting for inflation, this means Fitzgerald was paid 20 times as much.
Scalzi writes that this “basically sucks.” But I’d frame this somewhat differently. After all, this is F. Scott Fitzgerald we’re talking about. I’d guess he really is worth at least 20 times per word what the authors of articles in Fantasy & Science Fiction etc.
P.S. As a blogger, my word rate is 0 cents, of course.
The standard at the time (although it varied from magazine to magazine) was a penny a word; 6 cents was high. Still, that meant folks got paid 3-4 times as much. Still sucks for today's writers!
I remember reading something by Steven King (Perhaps it was in his 'on writing' book) about how much he earned by writing a short story that was published in Playboy. I forget how much it was, but it worked out to a few hundred dollars a week salary. Which one would imagine Steven King wouldn't even notice in his bank account.
what kind of deal did scienceblogs give you? :-)
Razib: They had some schedule of payment given page views, but the amount of money was so small I asked them to just give it to charity.
It seems appropriate that the money you can make from a statistics blog amounts to a rounding error.