Advice on Cengage Gale's Short Story Criticism

I'm not sure if this is the appropriate forum for this; if not, I apologize.

About eight years ago I wrote an essay on H. P. Lovecraft, which was published in an academic journal called The Explicator. And then I pretty much forgot about it. Last week, I got a call saying Cengage Gale wanted to reprint it in their Short Story Criticism, which is pretty cool. The form they sent me also included a check box to indicate whether or not I expected to be paid.

It's kind of weird - this is the first time I've ever heard of somebody being paid for literary criticism of less than book length. And they don't indicate a scale or anything; it's just, "do you require payment? If so, how much?"

I'd be happy to let them have it for free, but I'm also a fairly typical impoverished graduate student, and I can use anything I can get. Should I even bother asking for money? And, if so, how much do you think I should ask for? The essay's 1,300 words long. They're asking for, as far as I can tell, bog-standard non-exclusive rights; no transfer of copyright or anything else alarming.

Thanks for your help.

Thanks, I did that, and it worked out pretty well. I'm not sure if it would be professional to say how much they offered, so I'm not going to, but it was significantly more than I expected.