Just as we don’t pay musicians per note or artists by the brush stroke, it seems odd to pay writers for only the most visible part of their work.
There’s an apocryphal tale that the reason Charles Dickens’ stories were so long is that he was paid by the word. It’s a fun anecdote, yet sadly, untrue. In reality, his stories were actually serialized and he was paid per instalment—but there is still an element of truth to the tale. While Dickens may not have been paid by the word, many other writers at the time were, and it’s still one of the primary ways by which writers are paid today.
The practice goes back to the early days of print, when space was at a premium, and articles were allotted a certain number of inches on a page. The more important the story, the more space a writer’s words took up, and the more they were paid as a result.
Linotype machines producing a newspaper
It’s a convenient measure, sure. But given that writing is no longer bound by the confines of a printed page, is it really the best we can do in the internet age? Does paying writers by the word still make sense?
In the past, writing wasn’t the only profession where work was paid per word. Legal scriveners in the 19th century, for example, once charged per word—not because their space was limited, but unlimited. In other words, the practice allowed some lawyers to inflate their fees with nonsense writing. Unsurprisingly, clients complained, and the practice didn’t last long.
Telegraph companies also charged per word, and in hindsight, the practice actually makes a lot of sense. To send or receive a message, an operator was required to manually spell out each word, letter by letter, and so charging per word was a relatively direct way of gauging the labour involved.
But writing is arguably different. Just as we don’t pay musicians per note or the number of instruments used, or artists by the brush stroke or size of the canvas, it seems odd to pay writers for only the most visible part of their work.
For example, the words that make up a final story don’t reflect the entirety of the work required to get there. Consider all the drafts that a writer creates before reaching the final copy, or words that were written but left on the cutting room floor. Sometimes the shortest pieces can take days to write, while longer stories come together in no time at all. And once you begin to factor in time spent researching, interviewing, and even the cost of travel that some writing requires, it’s clear that perhaps the decision to pay per word never made much sense at all.
Yet, writing is where the practice has been the most enduring, and still exists today. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only way that writers can or should get paid. For some time now, publications and companies have been experimenting with different approaches to paying writers that aren’t rooted in the number of words on a page.
Perhaps the most obvious suggestion is to pay writers for their time, rather than the length of their final copy. After all, an article often involves a lot more than the act of writing itself, and an hourly rate is, in theory, one way to more accurately link labour to the words on the page.
“By the time I finish the research, the interviews, the writing, and the editing, whatever small sum—$30, $125, $200—this site pays me will pale in comparison to the effort,” author Noah Davis wrote in an article for a website called The Awl, where he kept track of how he spent his time when paid per word. At a rate of a $250 for his contribution, he determined he was paid $12.50 an hour for his work.
A more recent and controversial practice has been to pay writers based on the performance of their pieces—so, not based on the content of the story, or the labour involved, but the number of people that read a piece. At the beginning of 2008, the website Gawker famously introduced a bonus system that was tied to the performance of a story, paying writers per pageview. The idea is that the pages that net the most pageviews are most worthy of reward.
Back at The Awl in September of last year, Davis followed up on his previous article, this time working out a deal with The Awl’s editors to be paid a base fee of $200, and an additional dollar per thousand page views. The story received 350,000 page views, and he was paid $550 in total.
The payment-per-pageviews model hints at a larger trend, where the onus is shifting to readers to determine what writers get paid. Amazon, for example, last year announced a plan to pay authors based on the number of pages read. Similarly, sites such as Medium have experimented with paying its writers based, not on the number of people reading an article, but the time those visitors spend reading.
The epitome of this model is having the readers themselves directly pay writers—either through micro-payments platforms such as Blendle, or crowdfunding campaigns epitomized by sites such as Patreon, where readers support writers via recurring payments of as little as a few dollars per month.
None of these models have emerged as clear cut winners, but they show a range of forward-thinking ideas that go beyond the century-old practice of payment per written word. Given that number of innovative sites and apps that have emerged in recent years, isn’t about time we experiment with new ways of paying writers too?