Writers tend to keep their thoughts in the realm of ideas rather than calculate the seemingly mundane matter of the mechanics of the trade. However, a few months ago I sat down in a Chinese restaurant with a friend of mine who writes for the New Yorker and we agreed to leave our narrative musings to the side and think about practicalities. We were going to try to figure out how much the printed word is worth in America today.

We wanted to calculate how many feature stories the top magazines in America assign every year, and how much they typically pay their writers for the assignments. The list was only going to be for the top publications in America–the ones that pay between $1.50-$5 per word and that comprise the top tier of journalism. These are the magazines that line the shelves of airport bookstores everywhere and the ones that we write for pretty regularly. Think The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Atlantic, Wired, Men’s Journal, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, O, The Atavist, and the dozen or so other magazines that sits on the tops of toilet tanks and the tables of dentist offices from Seattle to Orlando.

It was back of the envelope math at best, but as far as either one of us could determine, it was the first time anyone had tried to figure out how biG the pie was for long form freelance writing in America.  There are hundreds of amazing writers in the country, delving into stories that drive the national conversation on everything from politics to the cult of celebrity to human rights abuses to cutting edge scientific and technological discoveries. These are the types of pieces that we make a living on, and ones that, frankly, we feel are important to write.

After ten minutes listing the average number of features in each magazine multiplied by the number of issues annually we had a number: 800. On average these stories would run at about 3000 words and pay $1.50 per word.  It was only a ball-park estimate of the overall freelance writing market cap. But it was also a rather depressing one.  Let me put this in bold so it stands out on the page.

The total market for long form journalism in major magazines in America is approximately $3.6 million.  To put it another way: the collective body of writers earned less than Butch Jones, a relatively unknown college football coach, earned in a single year. 

$3.6 million. That’s it. And the math gets even more depressing. If we assume that writers should earn the average middle class salary of $50,000 a year, then there’s only enough money in that pot to keep 72 writers fully employed.  And, of course, those writers would have to pen approximately 11 well thought out and investigated features per year–something that both my friend and I knew was almost impossible.

Now, it could be that our estimate was a little low. But even if you double it–a number that is almost certainly far and above the size of the actual feature market, then we are collectively still barely scraping above $7 million paid out by magazines in word rates every year. According to Small Business Chronicle, the overall magazine publishing industry generates a total revenue of $35-40 billion a year. While that number includes lots of publications that are not in our sample, it does give at least some sense OF how small a slice of the pie writers actually earn.

Another way to figure out what the total publishing industry is worth is to check out the advertising rates that mainstream magazines publish on their websites. Take Wired, for example – not to pick on them, but because they are a representative of the some of the best journalism that exists in the country today. According to its media kit, a single page of advertising sells for $141,680. (And that’s not even the top of the market. A full page ad in GQ sells for more than $180,000). Multiply that by the number of full page ads in a single issue of Wired (about 30) and you get about $4.6 million in gross revenues per issue of the magazine.

Think about that for a second.  A single issue of one major American magazine generates more gross revenue than what the entire magazine industry pays out in word rates over an entire year. If you figure that Wired spends about $30,000 on words in any given issue then a little more back of the envelope math says that words account for only 0.6% of the magazine’s revenue.

As a writer, this state of affairs horrifies me. I feel strongly that writers contribute more than just 0.6% of value to the overall magazine industry. Yes, magazines have a host of expenses–printing, distributing, editing, fact checking, office overhead and marketing all have a cost. But there is also something deeply sick in how little writers’ work is actually valued by the industry.