• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

John Champaign Writes

Adventures in Self Publishing

Historical Changes In Paid Fiction Writing

June 23, 2023 by John Champaign Leave a Comment

crop pondering man analyzing expenses and taking notes

I’m a bit of an anomaly as someone who has written extensively about personal finance (as Mr. Cheap) and currently is focused on writing books, many of which are fiction. Many writers are self-confessed math-phobic, while others are clearly uncomfortable with business and money based decisions. I’m comfortable with all of this and am often shocked at the opinions that otherwise well informed writers offer on these topics.

In this post I’m interested in how pay for fiction writers has changed over time. I’m *NOT* examining the cause or proposing any solutions, just trying to get an understanding of where we are.

This is surprisingly difficult, as authors are brands and it’s almost impossible to make useful comparisons between them. Consider John Scalzi, Brandon Sanderson, and Stephen King. These are three successful genre authors. I’d be hard pressed to even guess what their relative networth, incomes, and book sales are. I’m not sure this comparison would be useful, as they’re at different points in their careers and writing in different genres.

Instead, I think the way to approach this question is from the opposite end. What does a new writer get paid for selling their first piece of fiction? This isn’t perfect, but hardly anyone is a “brand” when they first publish (we can set aside people like Prince Harry and only consider writers coming from a relatively unknown background).

Modern Times

Offering myself as an example, I recently sold my first fiction piece. I’m not allowed to publicize the anthology yet, but I received $50 for flash fiction (400 words). In their call for submissions they offered $100 for short stories between 1,500 and 3,000 words, I was below the minimum, but they liked it anyways, and I got offered half.

This seems to be in-line with modern standards: $100 is considered decent pay for a short story (I’ve seen offers for a lot less than this). The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, one of the preeminent places to publish genre short stories these days, pays 8 to 12 cents a word, which would work out to around $100 for a 1,000 word story. Clarkesworld Magazine would also pay $100 for a 1,000 word story, and Asimov’s Science Fiction and Analog both pay 8 to 10 cents a word.

1950’s

In 1953, Anne McCaffrey sold her first short story, “Freedom of the Race” for $100. $100 was a lot more money in the 50s than it’s worth today (it’d buy a lot more stuff). Inflation tracks this and lets us, over periods of time, compare amounts of money in different periods. $100 in 1953 is equivalent to $1,139.95 today. It’s 1,000 words long, so it would have also been too short for the anthology I submitted to, but lets give it the benefit of the doubt and pretend it was accepted for $100. This means the pay today is more than 10 times less for new writers than in the 1950’s.

1880’s

In 1886 Arthur Conan Doyle sold his first Sherlock Holmes story for £25. It was longer, with different measures of the word count (28k to 47k, it’s weird that these vary so widely!). It does seems to have been more of a novella than a novel or short story. He wrote it in 3 weeks. £25 In 1886 would be £4,157.33 today. This is $5,319.62 USD, to compare with the other two. This is a little under five times what Anne McCaffrey was paid, over 100 times what I was paid.

Charles Dickens wasn’t paid at all for his first story in 1833, so perhaps that shows that writers have been getting cheated for a long time now.

Survivorship Bias

Some might say it isn’t fair to compare leading writers from the past to mediocre writers of the present (like myself). With the purchase of their first fiction, no one knew they were going to be famous writers, so I think we can consider pay rates for people’s first work as comparable in most cases (the author was good enough to pay, but wasn’t yet a brand).

What’s This Mean?

This is only three data points and they’re different text lengths, but I think they paint a picture of the continual decrease in payment for writing that has been happening over the last 150 years.

I posted an advanced copy of this to Reddit and John Scalzi commented on it!

Related

Filed Under: Self Publishing

Reader Interactions

Leave a ReplyCancel reply

Primary Sidebar

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 498 other subscribers

RECENT BLOG POSTS

  • Traveler’s Legacy Released
  • Shattered Dimensions Released
  • Expecting Friends And Family To Be Your Audience
  • Other Writers Are Our Colleagues, Not Competition Or Customers
  • Recording An Audiobook With A Narrator

Categories

  • Academic Advice
  • Board games
  • Business
  • Chickens
  • Game Development
  • Real Estate
  • Role Playing
  • Self Publishing
  • Writing Ideas

Archives

  • March 2025
  • December 2024
  • November 2024
  • October 2024
  • September 2024
  • August 2024
  • June 2024
  • May 2024
  • April 2024
  • March 2024
  • February 2024
  • January 2024
  • December 2023
  • November 2023
  • October 2023
  • August 2023
  • July 2023
  • June 2023
  • May 2023
  • April 2023
  • March 2023
  • February 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • October 2020
  • August 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020

Recent Comments

  • Intelligent Human Being. on The Problem With Online Discussion Forums
  • John Champaign on GameMaker Snakes and Ladders Tutorial
  • ZorgAlmighty on GameMaker Snakes and Ladders Tutorial
  • John Champaign on Other Writers Are Our Colleagues, Not Competition Or Customers
  • John Champaign on Block Fast, Mute Often

Copyright © 2025 · News Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in