Running the Numbers

Whew.  I managed to submit a 5000 word story Thursday night.  I've been chipping away on it since September 18th,  Here and there, a quick and dirty estimation is that I spent 25 hours on it.  If it sells, I could get one hundred dollars for it, which would work out to two cents per word.

I got carried away and should have kept it at 1000 to 2000 words, which would have been closer to the the more professional pay rate of five cents a word.     Using two cents per word as a starting point, I was writing about 500 fairly usuable words per hour.  Hmmm.  That doesn't exactly include editing, but I'm going to gloss over that for now.  But if I get paid for this story (and that's an if) what would mean (500 words/hour times 2 cents/word)  ten dollars per hour.    Something's wrong there, because if I spent 25 hours on the piece, getting paid a hundred dollars works out to four dollars per hour.   

Once again, Ursula Le Guin is vindicated and "writing to get rich is a damn fool idea."

And... yeah; if having a library of book royalties is going to ease my golden years, I'm going to have to actually write a book.