{"id":18527,"date":"2010-10-10T13:25:31","date_gmt":"2010-10-10T17:25:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/?p=18527"},"modified":"2015-02-03T15:43:35","modified_gmt":"2015-02-03T20:43:35","slug":"were-there-really-10000000-people-trying-to-write-and-sell-stories-in-1940","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/2010\/10\/10\/were-there-really-10000000-people-trying-to-write-and-sell-stories-in-1940\/","title":{"rendered":"Were There Really 10,000,000 People Trying to Write and Sell Stories in 1940?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Skimming through the latest <i>Writers of the Future<\/i> volume, I came across a reprint of a 1940 essay, &#8220;The Golden Pen,&#8221; 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.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s what Hubbard wrote 70 years ago:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;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.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I can accept the 10,000, 2,000, and 500 numbers as reasonable estimates&#8212;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.<\/p>\n<p>Any idea how Hubbard would have arrived at that number?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Skimming through the latest Writers of the Future volume, I came across a reprint of a 1940 essay, &#8220;The Golden Pen,&#8221; 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&#8217;s what Hubbard wrote 70 years ago: [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[628],"class_list":["post-18527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-l-ron-hubbard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18527"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18528,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18527\/revisions\/18528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}