In the current issue of the Mensa Bulletin, Richard Lederer’s article is about Mark Twain, including several quotes from Twain. One of them caught Mom’s attention: “I never write metropolis for seven cents because I can get the same price for city. I never write policeman because I can get the same money for cop.” She lauded that thinking, and to a degree, she’s right: a word is a word, and if one is getting paid per word, shorter indeed may be better. (Although I am a staunch proponent of precisely the right word, because there are nuances of difference in Twain’s examples.)

The stumbling point for me was that when I started working for Analog and Asimov’s, one of my jobs was writing up the contracts for stories the editors were buying. We had a formula for calculating words: count the spaces in an average-long line, multiply by the number of lines on the page, and then by the number of pages in the manuscript, and then divide by six to get the number of words we were paying for and then publishing. This formula thus included spaces and punctuation marks in the rate of pay, but it did not count actual words. It did, however, give an accurate length, which helped when putting together the puzzle pieces that were stories in an issue of a printed magazine. Also, recall that this was the end of the typewriter era, just as writers were starting to use computers. So actually counting the number discrete words in a document was almost always an inaccurate approximation. Thus, in that era, from those magazines, a writer was actually paid more for a longer word than for a shorter one. I had that epiphany after selling my first couple of stories, and tried to use longer character names for just that reason (“Tom” was worth 3 cents when they were paying 6 cents per six-character “word”; “Christopher,” however, was worth almost 12 cents). When I was publishing Artemis Magazine, I kept the approximation for figuring out pay rates.

Writing this now, when everything is computers and electronic submissions, I’m realizing I rely far more on the word processing program’s calculation of a number of “words” in a document, but the number of words only really matters when I’m publishing an anthology, and now the approximation I’m most interested in is “how many pages will this story fill.”

Anyway, it struck me as an interesting change. Ignoring the fact that Twain (who died in 1910) was getting seven cents a word, while writers today are lucky to find a fiction market paying that much, I’m wondering if the varying ways in which we count words has affected writers’ earning ability by any appreciable amount.