Conversation

My estimates the min cost of writing ordinary long form nonfiction well at various lengths in the US (not special stuff like poetry or advertising copy): 0-500 words: 5c/word 500-1500: 10c/word 1500-4000: 50c/word 4000-15,000: 75c/word 15,000-50,000: $1/word >50,000: $2/word
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If you aren't being paid at that rate, you're subsidizing the effort in return for access/exposure etc. The cost goes up with total length because you have to keep bigger ideas coherently stable in your head. Even with best structuring/modularization it gets harder and harder.
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I pay $100 honorarium for ribbonfarm contributions in the 1500-4000 range so really that should be $750-$2000 pay. So the exposure piece has to be worth $650-$1900 to people to take the bet.
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The reasoning here is neither fundamental economics nor the politics of what writing *should* be worth. It's basically the commodity cost of using your brain in that particular way. Think of it as the electricity consumption cost of your brain.
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Note that this is NOT an argument that people should be paying writers that much or an estimate that should inform the logic of collective bargaining type stuff. This is like the cost of steel or gasoline or something.
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These estimates come from what I was *actually* paid, either knowingly or unknowingly, to produce various things. Including for example, just writing on my own time in evenings/weekends back when I had a paycheck job (now I write during normal daytime work hours)
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The most I've explicitly being paid by the word is $0.55. Most of the time, writing for pay came bundled with research/consulting for pay.
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90% of stuff I've written, I've just written by myself on my own sites. But I can use the income level from other sources I had subsidizing the writing and check against that. As you might expect, the more comfy I am with cashflow+time surplus, the longer the things I write
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There's some sort of formula here relating the median length of writing I'm able to sustain indefinitely to the median cashflow and time surplus I have available. Median length = f(cashflow, leisure time)
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Kinda hard to estimate since inspiration/energy levels and health etc also make a difference, but it's basically right. Can compute the partial derivatives against those 2 and get at sensitivity.
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There's a reason things like twitter are popular. They are cheap to write in an input cost term. People who justify them on the basis of "more digestible" are idiots. Readers read at any length that's well written. They gravitate to short form when long form starts getting crappy
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It's not that people don't read books anymore. It's that people don't WRITE good books anymore because very few people have the input cost support structure to do so outside of academia, and academics pay for the privilege by being forced to narrow their horizons and audience
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One of the reasons I have a writing-based career is that for a decade I had a freakishly low cost-of-longform in the 3k-5k range. I was a sort of low-cost producer, able to crank out stuff at that length week after week on a fairly tight cash+time surplus.
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That youthful energy is now mostly gone, and I periods of 5k word burst energy are declining. I have to cashflow/time dependency equation OR accept the drift towards shorter and shorter forms until I'm only doing aphorisms :D
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So what size should you target? Suppose you write 1000 words/day, so 7000 words/week, should you write 7 1000 word things, 14, 500 word things? 2 3-4k word things? 1 7k word things? The "cost" to you will range from $350 to $7000. But it's a trick question...
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If you write 1000 words a day at a current chunk size of 1000 words (so you finish a thing a day), that does NOT mean you can work on 1/7th of a 7000 word thing per day over a week. Nope. Chances are, if you work 7 days on 1 thing, the end result will be more like 3500 words.
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Due to the overheads of reloading the mental model into your head every morning and quitting at a stable place every evening, you are less efficient. The rework risks also go up (the chunks you write and have to throw away) with size and breakdown structure.
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If you write in 1 sitting, there's a good chance, if you're decent, that you'll be able to write the whole thing in a single flow without anything needing to be thrown away. Very little chance of that happening as you go longer and split the work across sessions, days, weeks...
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I could probably model this out properly under various conditions of time/cashflow, and the boundary conditions of savings/steady-job-income you would need to occupy various positions on the intensity (words/day) vs. chunk size plane
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It's a constraint solver problem. If you have a job that pays X and leaves you with Y free hours per week, and you write at Z words/hour and want to target a chunk size of W, will you be able to reach an equilibrium output flow?
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Think of it as: if you can't spend $x/word in one way or another to write at a given length, but still try to you'll produce crap. You might still produce crap, but without the base input cost you're kinda guaranteed to produce crap. Starving is not a good condition to write in.
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Let's work out what a minimum-wage person in CA might be able to do. Min wage is $13. At 40h/week that's $520. Assuming they balance their budget somehow, their cost-of-life is about $3/hour. If they write 300/words per hour in their leisure time, it's 1c/word input cost.
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So by my cost/length curve, their natural chunk size is probably around 100 words if they want it to be good. They're best off tweeting rather than even targeting short blog posts of 300 words.
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The social psychology there is that the leisure hours are going to be so full of the stresses and anxieties of life at that income level, and the leisure hours available in such low-energy, smaller sessions, their output at bigger chunk sizes is going to be abysmal.
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Of course there are outliers. People who've written great works in prison or while subsisting on food stamps or slaving away in gulags. But the very rarity of such cases tells you that it takes the force of enormous passion/creative vision to override the default sweet spot
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tldr: there actually is a meaningful unit economics to writing, but most people are not aware of it because they rarely think in terms of production cost, only the realized market value... which for the median published public word is 0.
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Probably less than 0 actually. Negative if you count all those people writing words on non-free servers and not making anything from it.
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Note that this entire thread is about just the input costs of writing alone, assuming nothing very special in terms of research beyond just casual reading you would do anyway/living life and using that as fodder.
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Special research costs that can be directly attributed to the writing itself: - Reading things you would not otherwise read - Archival research - Interviewing - Travel for on the ground data collection
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Research costs that should NOT be attributed to writing are costs that can be attributed to a higher-value output. Ie research on a time machine to write about a time machine is not really research about the the writing, since the time machine is the more valuable output.