Mar 21 2008
$350,000 for Publishing Rights to Stuff White People Like Book?
This site provides writing advice. If you're writing a superhero novel or comic book, please also read our superhero writing articles.
Would you like to subscribe to our RSS feed?
Wow. Nice job, guys. The TWPL site started two months ago and has attracted 15 million hits (itself an astonishing achievement: I estimate they get 1800 times as many hits per day as we do).
If we assume that a publisher offers the same amount of money per hit ($.0233), then I’ve calculated that our site has so far created $600 worth of publishability. By my estimates, we work (collectively) between 20 and 40 hours a week for this website. I calculate that we earn $.83 per hour. [Update: for the month of September 2008, we earned between $1.20 and $1.75]
Final verdict: I shouldn’t quit my day-job.
By comparison, if we assumed that the author(s) of SWPL worked 20 hours a day for the last two months, Jess has earned $292 per hour. (Minus his/her costs, but I don’t know what those would look like. Traffic control, I guess).
*The publisher says the Observer’s $350,000 number is off but won’t say if it’s over or under the actual number. If I had to guess either way, I’d say the real number is likely lower…
