Money Matters
An ode to days when writers were paid to write.
In our last episode, I noted how much the writing world had changed since Anne Lamott first published Bird by Bird, in which she described receiving advance money on an unwritten novel, including additional funds released after she submitted two failed drafts.
A hundred years ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald supported a lavish lifestyle with income from his writing, the majority of which came from his short fiction rather than his novels and screenplays. Fitzgerald was reportedly paid as much as $4,000 for a short story, or about $70,000 in today’s money. In 1925, he earned $2,000 from a single short story, more than he earned in royalties from the first year of sales of The Great Gatsby.
In an entry in her Diaries and Notebooks, Patricia Highsmith recorded a few early sales of short stories. She earned $800 per story, or the equivalent of about $14,000 today. Earlier in her diaries, she mentions paying about $50 per month in rent. So the sale of one short story per year was sufficient to pay rent on a small apartment in New York City, with money to spare for utilities and telephone. I didn’t crunch the numbers, but a second short story was probably enough pay for food and a reasonable clothing and entertainment allowance.
That’s a far cry from $4,000, but bear in mind these were Highsmith’s first significant sales. She wasn’t yet the author of Strangers on a Train or The Talented Mr. Ripley. She was 25-year old comic book writer Pat Highsmith of New York, paying a year’s rent with one story.
Outside of the New Yorker or perhaps Harper’s, paying markets for fiction today are going to tap out around that 1947-era $800 bucks, if you’re lucky to get that high. A long story in the New Yorker might get you that $14,000, but only if you come with credentials. And even that won’t pay a year’s rent in New York City.
A million years ago, when I started submitting short fiction, most markets paid in comp copies, and a few paid $50 to $150. There were more top tier markets, like Playboy and The Atlantic, but unless your name was Kurt Vonnegut or Joyce Carol Oates, you weren’t catching those paydays.
As usual, I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time.
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