Following up on Dr. J. Berg Esenwein’s advice on whether it’s necessary to typewrite one’s short-story submissions and his thoughts on selling stories by paying personal visits to the editors, both cribbed from his 1908 book Writing the Short-Story: A Practical Handbook on the Rise, Structure, Writing and Sale of the Modern Short-Story, here are his thoughts on the all-important matter of getting paid.

Pay careful attention to what he has to say. One particular fact stood out for me. Let’s see whether the same thing grabs you:

If you have sold enough manuscript to warrant it, you may wish to set a price upon your story, but by doing so you run a risk. No ordinary circumstance will lead an editor to deviate from his regular rate. The fact that you have sold one or two stories at five cents a word to one magazine will not warrant your expecting another to pay you more than its accustomed honorarium. At the same time, if your minimum rate is actually five or three or two cents a word, frankly say so and abide by the consequences. If you offer a manuscript “at regular rates” do not haggle about the price after your story has been accepted. Remember that some magazines pay “on acceptance,” other pay “on publication,” while others pay not at all. …

Never put a string to your offer of a manuscript by telling the editor that you will accept his offer if it is good enough. If he is human, such a request will irritate him and may cause him to reject the story forthwith.

What struck me is that if you looked back at the cost of most things in 1908, you’d laugh. You’d chuckle about how life has changed and how cheap things were and how far we’ve come. For example, a century ago, the average annual income was $915 per year, bread was a nickle a loaf, and milk was 32 cents a gallon. You could buy a car for $500 and a house for $4,500.

And yet the price writers get for their work one hundred years later remains stable, and that’s not quite so amusing. The 1908 prices an editor might have paid are not very different from what we might be offered for our short stories today.

In 1908, you could buy a loaf of bread with a single word. How many words of short story would it take to buy a loaf of bread today?

And just try trading a 10,000-word short story for a new car!