I’ve been re-reading Frank Gruber’s The Pulp Jungle recently, and it’s an interesting source of context for the “Hungry Market” conditions I wrote about back when interrogating Heinlein’s Rules a while back. In chapter Three of his book, Gruber conducts a ‘state of the market’ survey of the pulp industry at the start of his career, noting there were approximately 150 pulp magazines active. He breaks down the editors and market focus, and the average pay rate of 1 cent per word many writers started on.
Intriguingly, he also breaks down the format:
The average pulp magazine of one hundred twenty-eight pages contained sixty-five thousand words. Since many of the magazines, such as Argosy, Detective Fiction Weekly, Love Story, Western Story, Wild West Weekly, were weeklies, the total market for stories was considerably greater than one hundred fifty times sixty-five thousand words.
There were also a number of semimonthly publications, such as Ranch Romances and Short Stories. Roughly, these weeklies and semimonthlies brought the total pulp market to about two hundred fifty copies of sixty-five thousand words per month. On a yearly basis, some one hundred ninety-five million words were needed to fill the hungry maws of the pulps. At the base rate of one cent a word, this meant a total outlay of almost two million dollars per year for stories.
One hundred ninety-five million words is a hell of a hungry market, even when split among the various genres. Every magazine had its own structure — if you’re curious, you can check many pulps out via the Internet Archive — but Gruber breaks down a rough guideline as:
- One “lead novel” of twenty-five thousand words
- 1-2 novelettes
- 4-8 short stories and features
Some magazines, particularly those which ran weekly, might the story or novelette entries with serial installments built out of 50,000 to 60,000 word novels.
The typical issue of Eclectic Projects, which is my own little pulp-fiction-esque experiment, only runs to 25,000 words. Somewhat idly, I’ve been pondering how to manage a “full pulp” on a monthly basis. On raw word-count — 2,100 words a day — its not an immediately impossible idea, especially when tools like the Nickel Novel Format make it easier to envision a novella structure which can be revisited month after month. For a full-time writer — even a relatively slow one such as myself — 2,100 words is potentially in the reach of a sustainable “cruising speed”.
Even the 3,500 words a day you’d need to write in order to take weekends off and four weeks vacation a year isn’t entirely impossible.
The trick here in the modern era — given the concerns I wrote about in Heinlein’s Habits — is being conscious of the aftermarket for work. Pretty much everything in a magazine can be repackage and released into the wild as a stand-alone, or as part of a larger reprint collection. Not every reader is going to dive into a monthly magazine, so you want to meet folks where they’re willing to read in much the same way that a comic books lifespan now moves from stand-alone issue to six-issue trade paperback to prestige format collection.
Were I to do it, I’d be eying off the following magazine breakdown:
- One 25,000 word novella
- One 15,000 word serial instalment of a four-part serial (or two 7,500 word installments, of two serials, one designed to wrap up at 30,000 words/4 issues, and one designed to wrap up at 60,000 words/8 issues)
- 20,000 words of short fiction. This can be two novelettes, four to eight shorter stories, or any combination thereof ( a huge part of putting the current Eclectic Projects issues together is finding the combination that will allows us to hit the allocated page count)
- 5,000 words of non-fiction
A single year would eventually result in twelve 25,000 word novellas, three 60k novels, one non-fiction collection of 12 articles, and about 48 stories (or 3 to 4 collections, at the length I typically work at).
Run the magazine for five years and you’re talking 60 novellas, 15 novels, 5 non-fiction collections, 20 short story collections, then various omnibus and special collections that emerge as you build up a stable of series characters or themed releases. That’s on top of 60 magazine issues and whatever subscription/patron base you’ve built up. Sell 50 or 80 copies of each book in your back list and it adds up to a pretty decent chunk of change.
Alas, I’m not in a place to do that. Certainly not until the PhD is done, and perhaps not even then. But I’m certainly looking at the structure and pondering ways to Ooch my way towards it, much as the weekly short story drops were a way of ooching my way towards the magazine in its current format.
The first place I’m experimenting is with the next few installments of the long-neglected Shackleton Job serial. I just finished writing first draft of the next instalment, which rounds off the segment on The Chronomancer’s Isle and clocks in at tweice the length of the sections I’ve been posting so far. I’ve also made the firm decision there will be another twelve instalments after that, wrapping the whole thing up as a 50k adventure serial that can become its own project after I’m done.
And it turns out I really needed that structure, especially after such a long break.
