The Writer’s Payment Calculator
A practical guide to converting literary prestige into groceries, rent, and resentment.
WHY IS THIS IN THE FILE?
Nobody took responsibility quickly enough.
Writers are constantly told that money is vulgar until somebody needs them to work for free.
So here is a calculator.
Step one: enter the promised fee.
If the publication pays $50, write down 50.
If it pays “exposure,” enter 0.
If it pays “contributor copies,” enter the retail price of the copies only if your landlord accepts chapbooks.
Step two: subtract the costs of being available.
Reading the guidelines: 20 minutes. Formatting the manuscript to satisfy a house style whose most important distinction is whether your name belongs in the upper-right corner: 12 minutes. Creating an account in a submission system that demands a biography, password, security question, postal address, and your feelings about cookies: 15 minutes.
Then there is the work itself. A 1,500-word essay may take four hours or forty. A poem may take twenty minutes and fifteen years.
Step three: include the invisible job.
Answer the editor. Send the headshot. Find the headshot. Discover that every photograph of you was taken under restaurant lighting. Approve the proof. Notice the proof contains an error you did not make. Point out the error. Receive a corrected proof containing a new error. Decide which error you prefer.
Now divide the fee by the hours.
You may discover that your “professional publication” pays less than the teenager who mows the lawn next door.
This does not mean you should never publish for little or no money. Small magazines are often broke for the same reason writers are broke: nobody downstream thinks the work should cost anything. A serious little magazine run by three exhausted people may be doing heroic work.
But the arithmetic matters because mystification helps the wrong people.
Prestige is not payment. Community is not payment. A line on a CV is not payment. Those things may have value, but they should not be smuggled into the cash column.
The calculator has one final field: Did you want to do it anyway?
If yes, proceed.
If no, the answer is not exposure.
Grant Nix
Nonfiction writer on the money, labor, status games, and institutional absurdities surrounding art, teaching, publishing, and supposedly creative work.
STATUS: UNRULY
“Normal” was considered and rejected.
KNOWN ASSOCIATES: readers, loiterers, people who should know better.
PUSH THE WEIRD BUTTON
A clerk has been notified. They are furious.