WORDS AND WAGES
David Bruce Bozarth
Copyright © 1999

Edgar Rice Burroughs was a prolific writer by any standards. Though his novels seem undersized in comparison to today's fiction authors, each contains just enough words to tell a fabulous story! The WORDS column in the chart below contains word counts (estimates) which may be ERB's or Heins'. The second word count is obtained from the Project Gutenberg etexts and arrived at using the word count function incorporated in WordPerfect 8. Checking the accuracy of WordPerfect with Microsoft Word 97 resulted in a discrepancy of less than 1%. The PENCE column contains estimated word counts submitted by Todd Pence. In years past I came up with similar numbers (average words per line times number of lines). Porges notes that ERB used that method for calculating his output when submitting it to editors. He was rather precise in those calculations using fractional averages per line (11.44, for example). The remaining column, PAID, reflects the first magazine amount paid to Ed Burroughs. These dollar amounts were obtained from a quick read through of Porges' biography. The amounts may not reflect the ultimate payment for the complete work. The Cave Girl, for example, was a two parter as was The Mad King. There are dollar amounts reported for other Tarzan texts, but the serial titles are not the same as the books. As soon as I have identified the correct title to credit, I will add these amounts later.