Skimming through the latest Writers of the Future volume, I came across a reprint of a 1940 essay, “The Golden Pen,” that L. Ron Hubbard wrote to kick off a writing contest sponsored by radio station KGBU in Ketchikan, Alaska. One of the statistics mentioned there startled me.

Here’s what Hubbard wrote 70 years ago:

“The estimated figures are that ten million people are trying to write and sell stories, that ten thousand have submitted stories to magazines, that two thousand have sold a story at one time or another and that there are only five hundred full professional writers in a nation of a hundred and thirty million people.”

I can accept the 10,000, 2,000, and 500 numbers as reasonable estimates—but 10,000,000? Was 7.7% of the population in 1940 really trying to write and sell stories? That seems like an extremely high estimate to me.

Any idea how Hubbard would have arrived at that number?