If the subscription numbers can be kept up, we will be increasing our fiction pay rate to 14 cents/word by the end of the year. Would have happened sooner, if a certain bookseller hadn't screwed us. We're working to pay everyone here better. No one left behind.
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@clarkesworld Woo! Great news, great pay, great magazine, great editor, great stories, great authors! Thanks Neil!
@clarkesworld rooting for you!
@clarkesworld My wife and I subscribe to you. Thanks for being there and doing what you do.
@clarkesworld
Dashiell Hammett and Earle Stanley Gardner were paid 3-4 cents per word in the 1920's.
@Okanogen Going by a NYT piece based on his letters, Hammett was paid a penny or two/word by the pulps. I think the one he did the most work for had a paid circulation of around 90K. None of the genre short fiction magazines are even close to that now. It's definitely had an impact on the economic landscape for short stories. That said, SFWA says the recommended rate is 8 cents and even at our current 12, we're paying more than most.
@clarkesworld
In the early years of Black Mask he was paid 1cent. He quit because it wasn't possible to live on that. He went to writing advertising copy which gave him a livable income. A change of editors (Sutton to Cody) and increase to 3 and then 4 cents per word brought him back, along with encouragement to write longer pieces.
I'm not making any moral argument about business models, just pointing out history of payment for writers.
@Okanogen Those were the serialized novels, right?
@clarkesworld
Primarily the Continental Op short stories. Nearly all were stand alone, but the later stories were adapted to be serialized into a novel, Red Harvest. The Glass Key also, which was a different character. Then he also wrote The Maltese Falcon, and The Thin Man, but as novels, not serialized shorts, and with different main characters.
@clarkesworld I've recently found your audio podcast on Pandora. Do they pay for listens and is there a better option for listening?
@VampiresAndRobots None of the those services pay us for the podcast.
@clarkesworld well, that's terrible.