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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Replying to @vgr
Can you share more about exactly when people lose the ability to crank out several thousand words really fast?
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I think it's highly dependent on themes of interest and individual personality. Some people are cranking away at their personal formula till they're on their deathbed.
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