There is low pay, and then there is LOW.

[seawasp]

John Scalzi has been disassembling a new "publisher" called Black Matrix (I'm not linking them for reasons that should be obvious) who are asking for pulp-style stories (a genre which would certainly have interested me) and offering the [sarcasm]princely[/sarcasm] sum of one-fifth of a cent per word -- i.e., $0.002 per word.

There are a lot of things that can be said about why this is a bad idea, but Scalzi has -- as usual -- said most of them.

What I want to do is just emphasize how very low this is. Many people don't really grasp what payment-per-word means, certainly not many starting authors, in terms of actually making money.

Grand Central Arena, my forthcoming novel, clocks in at about 155,000 words. At Black Matrix' prices, that would be a grand total of $310.

I'm known to be a very fast writer. I can average about 1200 words per hour when I get going. So -- ignoring the likelihood that there will be research, world design, etc., involved, assuming I can just sit down and the words flow like an undammed river from my fingers, needing no editing ever, they are offering to pay me $2.40 per hour. That's lower than minimum wage was when I was working jobs that might pay minimum wage. If I devoted a normal working year to writing, and never had any delays or problems writing (I'll assume two weeks off), that'd be 2,000 hours, or 2.4 million words, for a grand total of less than five thousand dollars (4800, to be exact) -- of which a significant chunk would have to be paid out in taxes (as it's self-employment).

This is not acceptable as "payment". This isn't even TOKEN payment. My advance for Digital Knight -- a first-time, completely unknown author selling a cobbled-together collection of shortish stories as a novel -- was $5,000 for 112,000 words, or TWENTY TWO TIMES what these people would pay. This is the difference in yearly terms between making $10,000 per year and making $220,000 per year.

Either pay a REASONABLE rate, or don't pay at all. But if you don't pay, you'd better be distributing your product for free.

Comments

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

It scarcely seems worth them writing cheques for that amount. Fanzines which send complimentary copies to contributors would effectively be paying a better rate than this for stories up to 2500 words.

[krmtdfrog.livejournal.com]

I mean shit... I've been given token dollars before - $30 for a 2500 word article and such, but that's a goddamned king's ransom compared to their scale. Who the hell would do that?

[mouser.livejournal.com]

They call upon the "spirit of the pulp magazines of the last century" - huh!


After 1926 Farnsworth Wright paid his contributors at the rate of one cent per word, double the going pulp rate of a half-cent per word...

[kengr]

They seem to have forgotten this little thing called inflation.

One cent a word in 1926 is likely closer to 10-20 cents a word now.

[seawasp]

Not forgotten it, ignored it. They aren't even offering the non-inflated price, they're cutting it by between 2.5 and 5 times!

[julesjones]

Those posts have been excellent, and I am so glad he's made them.

I've had my share of submissions to no-pay and token-pay markets. But one of my criteria is "Do I read this market myself?" It's all very well doing it for the exposure, but if I don't read it myself, that says something right there about how much exposure I'm going to get.

[seawasp]

Of course, by that standard I should submit almost nothing anywhere; after getting published I've read a LOT less, and I haven't read an SF mag since sometime in the 80s, I think.

[julesjones]

That's the problem, isn't it? Time spent reading is time not spent writing...

[izzylobo.livejournal.com]

Even most gaming companies pay better than that - lowest offer I've every gotten was two cents a word (admittedly, that was .02 Canadian, but still).

Hell, even the low-end pdf-only outfits at least have the good grace to be kinda shamefaced about the fact that they're only paying a cent or so a word, sometimes with a royalty for good sales - and they're working on a shoestring budget if ever I saw one.

[mrmeval.livejournal.com]

The pulps paid and paid well by todays standards. You could make a living writing for them and many did in their hey day.

[strega42.livejournal.com]

Just for comparison - waitstaff minimum wage is $2.13 an hour. Granted, that's in the expectation that waistaff is tipped enough to equal federal minimum wage, and if the waitstaff does not make that much in tips over a week's time, the restaurant is required to pad out the employee's check to equal minimum wage (although after two weeks of that, the waitstaff is typically fired for under-reporting tips).

So, the publisher mentioned here is basically paying writers as if they were unskilled high school dropouts.

Sounds fair to me! (/sarcasm).