You can't put a value on literary excellence.

Suppose over a period of time you had written 49,999 words about such essential topics as outsized pencils and enormous watering cans. For free. You might wish you’d gotten maybe a dime a word. You could have bought an eight-year-old Camry or nearly seven thousand Little Debbie Nutty Bars. Or even a dollar a word – gosh, that’s a nice foreclosed ranch home in Blytheville, Arkansas. Long ago, a buck a word was premium pay for really popular writers, like Rudyard Kipling. He got a letter that enclosed a dollar and asked for a word in exchange. Kipling wrote back, “Thanks.”