A closer look

Sometimes you have a great setting but absolutely zero imagination for what happens next. Jack London, famous for rugged survivalist novels, frequently ran out of ideas. So, he just bought story concepts directly from a struggling young writer named Sinclair Lewis. London would pay him around five to fifteen dollars for a fleshed-out plot, polish it up, and publish it under his own name. The literary gig economy was alive and well in 1910.