Arizona republican., 1905-02-03
The Honey Paid for Literature.

The announcement by the New York Times that an unfinished. recentIy-d covered novel by Lord BcaconsfeId had been sold for a sum which net ted one dollar a word. has caused Q general discussion of the rates paid writers of the present day.
 Not Ions ago the Denver Post mod estly invited OUT attcatioH-as 1t did the attention O. newspapers general Iy, no doubt-to the fact that it had imported Miss HaIIie Erminie Rives into Colorado to write a description of the Garden of the Gods" and that the fair and throbbing young lady from Virginia would be paid at the rate of twenty-five cents a word. This, ac- cording to our Denver contemporary, is several times over what was paid Rudyard KipI:ng in the days of his highest popularity; more than was paid to Charles Dickens in the height of his career"
 The New Yor,S Post, which habitu- ally sneers at OUT western bumptious- ness. protests that the rate exploited by the Denver Post is niggarGly. And with fine sarcasm it makes this quota ton from Miss Rives' article on the Colorado scenery: "The fear of the abyss that had touched me once before the voiccIess quaIm of the outre came to me. I grasped the inner agony Of Dante, and the meaning of Wagner I felt the clutch of old Rhenish folk legends. the reasOnIess shudder of the diablerie of Poe. It was the Call of the Weird-the seIf-hymning of the elemental rune of terror on the harp strings of my soul" How many of us" asks the Post, flor a paItry twen- ty-fve cents a word, would suffer those things? It raises an interesting ques- ton of economics: What is the price of q woman's nerves? for these harp strings of the soul can not often vi brate so strenuously without snap pins"
 The claim that a dollar per word was the highest rate ever paid for fiction has given rise to considerable speculation and discussion and brought to light some interesting figures Public Opin- ion states Conan Doyle. for resurrect- ing Sherlock Holmes and writing twelve new stories about him. was paid S45,0OO by Golfers Weekly. a rate of about sixty cents a word. Me Cures paid Kipling $25,OOO or thirty five cents a word for the English and American rights to Kim" Mrs. Humphry Ward is known to have re- ceived $15,OO0 for the serial rights of several novels, the length of which re- duces her rate per word considerably below Kipling's. Richard Harding Davis boasts of forty cents word for stories and Golfers Weekly admits having paid him that much. Booth Tarkington commands about twenty five cents a word, while a large num- Der of popular writers average from ten to fifteen cents. The cnterprising statisticilu who made the rounds Of the offices of the publishers to col Icct these figures for the Times csu- mates that for good, reliable story tClIoT-o1c upon whose entertaining powers the public has learned to count a rate of ten cents word Is exceed ingly good-so all the publishers agree Five cents word is good for most. Yet even literary hacks" just now are apt to demand two or three cents a word, rate which the publishers con slider excessive and unreasonable.
 All the publishers consulted agreed that the rate paid for good magazine matter-not the work of genius. but Of serviceable and dependable taIent-had doubled in the last five years. All in sisted. however, that a rate of twenty five to thirty-five cents word was for all practical magazine purposes a maximum, though they admitted that there were exceptional circumstances. For instance. magazines have ire Queltly paid Mir. Cleveland or MT Hay a thousand dollars or more for an article of under 1.OOO words Me Cures, years ago, paid Tennysou $1000 for his little poem called The ThrOstle"-a price which a mathemat- icaI mind might readily figure into a rate of something over SiO a word. Golfers Weekly. not many months ago. paid Mir. Kipling 1000 for his poem on the Russo-Japanese war, and there have been times when James Whitcomb RiI- ey has received as much for a single short set of verses. In applying the rate-per- word measure to books that have met with phenomenal success. Mrs. WiEgs of the Cabbage Patch" leads all the rest. That little volume of 10000 words, at a royalty of twenty.