I recently ran across a review (from 2013) of Kurt Vonnegut's collected letters. He was working in public relations for General Electric (in the early 1950s, I gather) when he sold his first story to Collier's (a large-circulation magazine of the time). He wrote to his father that if he could sell five stories a year, he would make more than a year's pay at GE.

But he wrote in 1986, "the magazines had gone out of business, and I was suddenly in the position of having to write a whole book in order to get what used to be my fee for just one story."