I have read that e.g. Dickens was paid specifically by the word, plus some mentions of similar policy in the 20th century. Well, so why would the publisher do that? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to tell the author how many words (or pages) to write and then pay a fixed sum from within a pre-agreed range (let’s say dependent on quality)? I mean, usually money is supposed to be paid for “performance” i.e. for achieving a useful goal, and I don’t see how writing maximum number of words on the topic of “The Tale of Two Cities” or “Christmas Carol” would be a useful goal in any sense.
I haven’t seen it done with books, but it’s still common in other types of freelance writing (e.g., magazines). It’s analogous to paying a bricklayer by the number of bricks he lays, or by the total square footage he covers. Clearly, a magazine is going to pay more for an article three pages long than they will for an article one page long, and word count is an easy way to do it.
Incidentally, a number of the magazines I’ve written for break it into categories rather than paying X amount per word. They might, for example, pay $200 for articles up to 500 words, $500 for articles 500-1500 words, and $1000 for articles over 1500 words.
The reasoning behind pay per word is that in periodicals, as opposed to books, the amount of space taken up by the work is the significant factor. A ten-thousand word short piece takes up less physical space than a hundred-thousand word novel and gets paid for accordingly.
You don’t tell authors ahead of time how many words their novel has to be because that way you get garbage as a result.
It’s really just a way of paying pro-rata.
An editor may want an article of any length and they have a rate per word so that s/he can work out the correct rate for the article.
I doubt many authors are allowed to write articles of a length of their own choosing and then get an amount per word.
And many novels by, e.g., Dickens, were originally pubished serially in periodicals.
When you write for magazines as a freelancer, you typically pitch an idea. If they like the idea, then they ask you to write it up. Sometimes the article is already written and is then adapted to what the magazine wants. Either way, they are essentially using the per-word rate as a way to set a price on the whole contract. They set both the rate and the word count, so it’s not like the author can inflate things by padding the word count (much).
You also have to remember that nothing gets published exactly as the writer submits it. There are editors who are in a position to reword, delete, rearrange, etc. So even if an author tried to pad it, there are ways to remove that.
Novels are not paid by word in any case that I know of.
Most of Dickens’ work was written to be published in magazines one chapter at a time, and each magazine allotted so much space for him to fill. It’s only later that the serials were compiled into a book. So he’s more comparable to a freelance writer for a magazine than the typical novelist. With certain books (like Great Expectations) you can clearly see that chapters are meant to string you along from month to month so that you keep buying the publication.
Most of my magazine work goes like that. I send in a query, and the editor says something like, “That sounds good. Make it 1,200 words with a 200-word sidebar, and here’s what we can pay you.”
As far as how payment by the word affects things, the publishers don’t want to pay for words their readers don’t want to read. An article or story padded out will turn off readers and hurt the sales and circulation of the magazine. And, of course, the editor wants to keep expenses down – the more words, the less space for ads.
Also, paying by the word makes it easy to budget. You know your magazine needs 50,000 words each month and you pay five cents a word. That’s $2500 a month, a set amount that’s easy to plan for. If the work is not up to quality, you don’t buy it, and buy something that is.
It makes it easy to negotiate payment, too. “You’ve given me 5000 words of good stuff. We pay 5 cents a word; here’s your check for $250.”
Dickens also was writing in a different world. Whatever the common assumptions are about how arrangements are made between writers and periodicals are time dependent (as well as place dependent and genre dependent and a million other variables).
Today’s nonfiction magazines almost always assign an author a set word count before a nonfiction article is accepted. However, today’s fiction magazines don’t. Writers write whatever length stories they want and the editor compiles a number of them and sorts them so that each month’s space is filled.
It’s often been the case in history, however, that writers would be solicited to contribute articles and allowed to write however much they wanted. Sometimes these articles would get edited down, sometimes not. We’re covering millions of examples over hundreds of years. Every possible variation has occurred.
There have been lots of times when sheer bulk was a virtue. Filling pages is the nightmare of every editor. Pulp magazine authors wrote in famously purple prose because they knew that editors wanted to fill pages, and would pay for extra wordage to do so. Wordy writing from good authors is still better than terse writing from bad authors. Presumably Dickens’ editors felt more or less the same way; I know a lot more about the pulp era.
For an example of what happens when you give writers a set number of pages and tell them to fill them up, consider the career of Robert Lionel Fanthorpe (AKA Pel Torro). His publisher wanted books of x pages. Nobody seemed to care what filled those pages. Fanthorpe would literally copy pages out of thesauruses. You can find a random quote generator here. Neil Gaimon said, “Do not read too much Lionel Fanthorpe at one go, your brains will turn to guacamole and drip out of your ears.” and he was quite right. And yet, like with chips, you can’t stop at just one. I dare you.
Again, this applies mostly to magazines (and partially to newspapers for freelance articles). Books are almost never contracted for this way. Many magazines today have shifted over to flat payments instead of pay per word. Other arrangements exist, including yearly contracts. The New Yorker still, AFAIK, puts their major writers on a yearly contract and then adds on for work published. (Well, it’s actually more complicated, but that’s close enough.) Employees, like reporters, may often have their salaries cover all their writing, although exceptions can be made for special articles.
To get back to the OP, filling pages is the metric of performance. How well those pages are filled is an interesting side issue. The entire history of publishing is the balance between those two.
As well-illustrated by Lionel Fanthorpe, who did write to a given word count, and it shows:
http://www.pacifier.com/~dkossy/gal666.html
I swear, I really do think that sometimes he padded his wordcount as needed by opening a thesaurus and copying the synonyms directly into a list in his text.
Exapno Mapcase, as usual, made an excellent point I forgot to make: the writing world doesn’t all work alike. Fiction authors generally write the story first and then sell it. Nonfiction authors are more likely to develop a concept, sell it, and then write it. Textbook authors and tech writers are often salaried, with no advances and no royalties. There’s no single way it works.
I know that back in the 50s, Astounding Science Fiction paid a flat 1¢ a word (I think others paid less). Every month readers voted in the best story and the author got paid an extra ½¢ a word. Maybe second place got something too, I don’t recall.
My wife, a translator, charges 25¢ a word (of the source). It is a kind of piece work (and I never understood the objection to piece work; why shouldn’t people who produce more get paid more?).
Yeah, it’s just convenience. A pre-agreed way of paying people by article length.
You can predetermine that article length also. It’s not like it’s x/word, produce an article of random length. Because it’s used so much, it’s an easy way to guage pay rates (especially for the author).