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My experience writing and selling a short story

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Re: My experience writing and selling a short story

#111

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

leephillips wrote: post #109
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’ve got this a bit twisted, particularly with the notion of for-profit organizations taking with no compensation. Speaking strictly in short fiction, frankly, the vast majority of magazines lose money. Of the magazines that don’t lose money, the vast majority of those don’t make enough to earn the producer/editor(s)/first readers/etc. anything resembling minimum wage. The exceptions are a mere handful: the…

Uhh, this thread started with somebody giving their work away to Tor.

No, the article in question is about a person who was paid over a thousand dollars for their work to be purchased by Tor.

Re: My experience writing and selling a short story

#112

Post by xhevahir »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #45
xhevahir wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short stories used to be the more lucrative form. Writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald made most of their income from selling short stories to magazines like Collier's or Esquire, not novels.

Alexandre Dumas serial published The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo - being paid by the word - which is why they're so long - but also extra impressive how good they turned out. The stories were not finished while the beginnings were being published.

That's right, I was forgetting serialized novels. They were big, too.

That method of Dumas was how Dostoevsky worked, at least some of the time--not knowing exactly what he was doing in a novel until after its first chapters had already appeared in a magazine. Presumably his gambling debts had something to do with this habit of working, although he supposedly had a case of what they call "hypergraphia," and could produce an incredibly amount of writing in a short amount of time.

Re: My experience writing and selling a short story

#113

Post by leephillips »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #111
leephillips wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhh, this thread started with somebody giving their work away to Tor.

No, the article in question is about a person who was paid over a thousand dollars for their work to be purchased by Tor.

I’m not talking about the article. Look at the comment that I originally replied to.

Re: My experience writing and selling a short story

#114

Post by foota »

munificent wrote: post #87
foota wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, I think this is somewhat unavoidable, there's only so much time people can spend consuming entertainment, and so the market for it is somewhat fixed. Meanwhile, there are many people willing to produce it. I don't know if it's possible for writing/entertainment/etc., to be sustainable for a large portion of the population without major economic reform.

> there's only so much time people can spend consuming entertainment, and so the market for it is somewhat fixed. It's even worse than that, actually. Because existing entertainment can still be consumed long after its produced, and even consumed more than once by the same person. When you write a book today, you aren't just competing with other new novels, you're competing with every novel written all the way back t…

True, but there's sufficient distinction between contemporary and classical works that I think the effect may be limited.

Re: My experience writing and selling a short story

#115

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

leephillips wrote: post #113
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the article in question is about a person who was paid over a thousand dollars for their work to be purchased by Tor.

I’m not talking about the article. Look at the comment that I originally replied to.

That person was about someone who got paid 50$ at a completely different place?? Am I missing something?

Re: My experience writing and selling a short story

#116

Post by BMc2020 »

f17 wrote: post #50
dqpb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why you would sell for that amount.

You don't do it for the money. You do it for exposure. If you sell a short story that goes viral, you'll probably get a six-figure advance (which is not as much as it sounds like) on your next novel. That said, the odds aren't great; writing is about the worst way to make money imaginable, in part because either there's no barrier to entry (self-publishing) or there are barriers to entry but they're dysfunctional and…

You don't do it for the money.

*DANGER WILL ROBINSON DANGER*

Re: My experience writing and selling a short story

#117

Post by leephillips »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #115
leephillips wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not talking about the article. Look at the comment that I originally replied to.

That person was about someone who got paid 50$ at a completely different place?? Am I missing something?

No, my mistake.

Re: My experience writing and selling a short story

#118

Post by Enderboi »

eloff wrote: post #13

My brother writes Sci Fi for a living. He's self taught and self published. He does well, he's sold over a million books. What many people don't know is he suffered from severe tendonitis that really narrowed his career options. He started writing because he could write using voice recognition software. Now he writes with a keyboard, as the pain is more manageable. I'm extremely proud of him for how well he's been ab…

I've been reading Jasper's work for a quite a while, and given your brother's very regular output would never have guessed!

It's hard to even visualise the effort it must have taken to overcome those obstacles to become one of the better self-published sci-fi authors. Respect.

Re: My experience writing and selling a short story

#119

Post by asicsp »

paulpauper wrote: post #2

writing has to be among the worst ways to make money, sorry to say you need top .5% talent and work ethic to maybe earn a lower-middle class salary A labor of love, as it's said

>writing has to be among the worst ways to make money, sorry to say

Depends. I left my high paying job and had mostly burned through my savings until selling programming ebooks saved me. Not saying that writing was the best option, but it was the first that started paying my bills consistently. Of course, the fact that my monthly expenses was around $150 helped a lot. I've now written 12 books and the past two years has brought my savings back to a comfortable level.

Re: My experience writing and selling a short story

#120

Post by spookybones »

vincentmarle wrote: post #81

I was once interested in how self publishing actually works so I spent an hour or two putting a pdf together with Chuck Norris facts that I found on the internet and published it as a paperback. The book is still up for sale, I've made more than $10,000 from it.

Are they actual facts or joke facts? If jokes, did you have to worry about source material? Also, did you have to get permission from Norris' agency?
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