I think eeh raises a good point. If mainstream writers have support to get over any biases against free culture licenses, there's the potential for a ton of great writers to port a lot of great content to devtome. Because they don't get paid right now (or get paid very little) for creating, and devtome exists expressly to pay creators. So maybe (again, not informed enough to have a real opinion, but this is just a possibility) what devtome needs is more writers putting in 100k words, rather than a lower max word count. Advertising has been plugged a lot in this thread as the way to do that, but I think in conjunction with that, devtome needs to look safe and reliable to a non-hacker audience. Right now that's hard for a layperson to judge because of the visuals of devtome, the variability in quality, and the bias in language of a lot of the main pages toward people who understand the code of all this.
The two most immediate solutions I see are to continue to improve the quality control system and be in open communication about it (which seems like an active, on-going process as this discussion demonstrates), and to get a page up written for the layperson about earnings (which I'm drafting).
It is not a max number of words really, just a max number that get paid out in one "round" of payouts.
One of the underlying limitations is that there only 4000 "blocks" (on the "blockchain") per "round", and our code only supports fifths of a share granularity, meaning only five people can get paid in any one "block".
Thus even if each person to be paid only gets paid one fifth of a share, we can currently only pay 5 * 4000 = 20000 people per "round".
Thus in essence each 1/5 of a share you get is 1/5 of a share someone else isn't getting, and we can only support a max of 20000 recipients per round with our current code.
20000 recipients sounds like a lot, but even supposing we only had 200 recipients, for any one of them to get more than 100 * 1/5 of a share (20 shares) would require at least one other of them not to be able to get that many shares.
So the code/capability in place already prevents us from issuing all 200 people in such a scenario any more than at least a full 20 shares each. For someone to get 80 shares, three others of the 200 people would have to get none, or 60 others of them only get 19, etc.
TL;DR there are only ever 4000 shares total in a round, maximum. (Thus up to 20,000 1/5ths of a share.)
-MarkM-