I decided to write Westerns

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I decided to write Westerns because there was a terrific market for Westerns in the ’50s. There were a lot of pulp magazines, like ‘Dime Western’ and ’10 Story Western’ that were still being published. The better ones paid two cents a word. And I thought, ‘I like Westerns.’

Elmore Leonard

11 thoughts on “I decided to write Westerns”

    • I was never interested in Westerns, at least in books, I have found some Western movies interesting. But the Western motif can be used in quite a few stories and genres. Two of my favorite are Sword & Sorcery and Wuxia fiction. Good luck on your SF story!

      • Now you see, that is set in a time ‘before’ the wild wild west. It’s always a time in which you couldn’t depend on help being just around the corner when you needed it, nor it was an easy call away. (The telegraph kept getting its lines cut and the pony express didn’t always make it through.)

    • “Conveniently” that $1000 from 1950 equals $10,000 today.

      Or to put it differently: average income was $3200 and the average new car cost $1500. So he got two-thirds of a new car per 50K novel. Today the average car price is $33300 so that $1000 could also be seen as the equivalent of $22K today.

      Sounds like you could make a living from three books a year and be well off from one a month with fits the stories of how well off Walter B. Gibson was. (He reportedly cranked out 10000 words a day. and peaked at 1.6m a year.) Even at the lower rates of the 30’s that was decent money.

    • I think typically they had limits on the length of the story. So you had to wrap it up and get the next one picked up by an editor. It’s more the pulp house mentality rather than the long novels.

  1. For what it’s worth, I think Leonard’s mysteries and thrillers are closer to Westerns than typical mysteries and thrillers. Think about Chili Palmer riding into LA in Get Shorty. That’s a Western pardner!

  2. Dutch is one of my favorite writers. Loved his westerns as well as his crime novels. I think I’ve read everything he wrote.

    I also liked the westerns Robert B. Parker wrote.

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