People whose stories get used as part of a compilation in a book rarely get royalties. Those go to the author or, if the book is put together all from people's stories, an editor.
If people write down their own stories, and those stories don't need a lot of editing to be publishable, market rate for short stories is a one-time payment of cents per word. I think the last pieces I did like that I did for about a nickle a word. What you're usually selling the person putting together the book is first (North American) publication rights to your piece, and unlimited rights to reprint, and perhaps (or perhaps not) non-exclusive rights for them to use other places, with you retaining the rest of the rights. What that means is that if someone offered you money to reprint, you could take it, or you could reprint it freely as part of your own later work, or an international work, or yet another publication--except you'd be selling them the right to reprint it, non-exclusively, in whatever they were doing. You'd also get a lot less money for letting someone do a non-exclusive reprint.
Since the short pieces I did were works in some other author's universe specifically for a role playing game manual, I sold all rights, not just first publication. Again, for about a nickle a word, since I'm a pro. It's not uncommon for the rate for non-pros to be 3.5 cents a word.
People who don't write down their own stories, or whose writing requires substantial editing and/or rewriting to be publication quality, usually have their story included by permission and for no pay.
The exception would be that big money publications might pay celebrities for an interview.
Joe guy with an experience, when someone else is writing, substantially rewriting, or correcting loads of spelling and grammar errors, usually gives permission or doesn't get included. Frequently, Joe gives permission and doesn't get paid even if he does write up his own experience or doesn't get included.
Usually, if too many of the people volunteering their experiences want money, the book just doesn't get written/published.
Professional-quality writers or editors don't give their time for free or for pennies, we don't get paid a whole lot anyway, and if a whole bunch of people decide their stories are worth a lot of money, it cuts into that already low pay too much.
Writers who aren't professional quality generally can't get a real publisher with one of the national distributors to buy their book at any price. It costs too much to print a book, and most first books by an author or editor lose money for the publisher.
For example, Baen Books (my publisher) is distributed by Simon and Schuster, which means Baen's monthly book releases go to all the major book chains just like the rest of the stuff S&S distributes.
If you're a publisher, when you take on a new author, if you take virgin authors at all (a lot of publishers don't, or only take them rarely), you want to be pretty sure that author has more than one book in them.
A lot of publishers don't accept unagented submissions, and a lot of agents don't want to hear from you if you aren't already published.
If an author or editor doesn't sell the book to a publisher, they don't get paid. If they don't get paid (and most people who write books don't succeed at selling them), they certainly can't afford to pay people whose personal accounts may be included.
It's the simple economics of the business. If getting your personal account out there isn't its own reward for you, it's unlikely to happen.
If you're a professional quality writer, you can maybe sell articles about your various personal experiences to magazines, but that's a very competitive market and most of the time that's not going to happen, either. Even if you're a pro targetting the magazine market, you're going to have a lot more articles or queries rejected than you have accepted.
Professional quality writers usually have far more publishable ideas than they have time to write them. This means that any book for which other people want a cut is rarely worth their time.
Julie
