|
95,000 words sold | |
| DETECTIVE |
————————— = 29.65% |
|
320,000 words written |
|
21,500 words sold | |
| ADVENTURE |
————————— = 71.7% |
|
30,000 words written |
Thus, for every word of detective I wrote I received $0.002965 and for every adventure word, $0.00717. A considerable difference. I scratched my head in perplexity until I realized about raw materials.
I had walked some geography, had been at it for years, and thus, my adventure stories were beginning to shine through. Needless to say, I’ve written few detective stories since then.
About this time, another factor bobbed up. I seemed to be working very, very hard and making very, very little money.
But, according to economics, no one has ever found a direct relation between the value of a product and the quantity of labor it embodies.
A publishing house had just started to pay me a cent a word and I had been writing for their books a long time. I considered them a mainstay among mainstays.
Another house had been taking a novelette a month from me. Twenty thousand words at a time. But most of my work was for the former firm.
Dragging out the accounts, I started to figure up on words written for this and that, getting percentages.
I discovered that the house which bought my novelettes had an average of 88 percent. Very, very high.
And the house for which I wrote the most was buying 37.6 percent of all I wrote for them.
Because the novelette market paid a cent and a quarter and the other a cent, the average pay was: House A, $0.011 for novelettes on every word I wrote for them. House B, $0.00376 for every word I wrote for them.
I no longer worried my head about House B. I worked less and made more. I worked hard on those novelettes after that and the satisfaction increased.
That was a turning point. Released from drudgery and terrific quantity and low quality, I began to make money and to climb out of a word grave.
That, you say, is all terribly dull, disgustingly sordid. Writing, you say, is an art. What are you, you want to know, one of these damned hacks?
No, I’m afraid not. No one gets a keener delight out of running off a good piece of work. No one takes any more pride in craftsmanship than I do. No one is trying harder to make every word live and breathe.
But, as I said before, even the laborer who finds his chief pleasure in his work tries to sell services or products for the best price he can get.
And that price is not word rate. That price is satisfaction received, measured in money.
