Was Charles Dickens paid by the word?
No. All his fictional works were contracted for individually. Because the contracts generally specified a certain number of installments and the installments were of a specific number of pages, you could calculate a rough rate of pay based on an approximate number of words. But none of his contemporaries or publishers thought to do that. With his first novel (*The Pickwick Papers*), he quickly became Eng land’s most popular novelist and remained so until his death. He was paid very well, reflecting his immense popularity, and he was under no pressure to produce a lot of words except from his voluntarily chosen modes of publication and writing.
