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My experience writing and selling a short story

superamit.substack.com

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Re: My experience writing and selling a short story

#141

Post by hackernewds »

ivraatiems wrote: post #12

It's worth noting that Tor's pay for authors is in the absolute top tier. I've had a short story published in a smaller publication, and they paid me $50 total - $25 for the first six months exclusivity, then $25 again for inclusion in an anthology. That is more typical for a starting out author. OTOH, getting published in Tor at all is a much much bigger achievement - congratulations to the author!

As an outsider, these seem like terrible compensation for time esp given the talent it seems necessary to publish here.

Re: My experience writing and selling a short story

#142

Post by sammalloy »

anonwriter42 wrote: post #100
sammalloy wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> writing has to be among the worst ways to make money It’s being a musician, actually. Most writers have the skills to maintain good side gigs of some kind or another. Musicians have to dedicate more of their time to musicianship, and often end up on the lower side of the pay scale. Sure, there will be a few with a profitable clientele paying for private lessons and tutoring, but that’s far more rare.

The side gig used by many "writers" is to establish yourself as one of many mentors that offers guidance for get rich quick schemes such as the blacklist. In reality, for most writing is a fading interest. It's a skill that anyone can really pick up if they wanted to but doing so is easy to learn and hard to master. You can go long periods of time writing and never improve. Due to how the system as whole is designed…

> The side gig used by many "writers" is to establish yourself as one of many mentors that offers guidance for get rich quick schemes such as the blacklist.

Wasn’t this Charlie Kaufman’s take, or was it Quentin Tarantino? I remember reading an interview with one of them who riffed on this complaint. For some reason, I think it was Kaufman, because I was obsessed with his process at the time.

Re: My experience writing and selling a short story

#143

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

gizajob wrote: post #136
BeetleB wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neal Stephenson is a very poor storyteller. Most of his books are excuses for writing encyclopedic entries on certain topics, and packaging it as a story to make money.

https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ Mother Earth Mother Board is a great example of storytelling. I was using him as a sidestep from Crichton, given that's where the author is saying he's at. HG Wells or Margaret Atwood would also be good places to start, when looking for examples of the craft of short-story writing.

Margaret Atwood is a terrible writer. If you're going to put someone next to Wells for mastery of the craft, that should be P.G Wodehouse. I would add Jerome K. Jerome to the list, also.

Then of course there are master storycrafters in SF like James Tiptree Jr., Cordwainer Smith, Ted Chiang, Clifford D. Simak, Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Brian Aldiss, Fredric Brown, Theodore Sturgeon, and others I'm forgetting. And H.P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, Clark Ashton Smith, R. E. Howard and Arthur Machen from the strict fantasy side.

Re: My experience writing and selling a short story

#144

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

madaxe_again wrote: post #134
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

I write, purely for my own pleasure, as as you say, it’s absolutely no way to make a living. I’ve hundreds of shorts, a few dozen novellas, and a couple of novels - with which I have precisely zero interest in doing anything. Writing them was the point. This, unfortunately, has been the case practically for as long as literature has existed - very, very few authors make anything more than a pittance from their work i…

Genre fiction like S/F has different rules. In S/F you're taught to write in a way that will get you published, and paid for your work. I posted this a couple weeks ago, it's a quote from an interview with Ted Chiang:

TC: I think the reaction varies, because science fiction is a more commercial genre. There are a lot more people in science fiction whose goal is to make a living from writing fiction by publishing one or more novels a year. And people who enter science fiction generally receive more messaging about fiction writing as a sole source of income than, say, people entering mainstream fiction. The messaging there is different: get an MFA, teach; it’s understood that your teaching position supports your career as a writer. For writers entering science fiction, that’s not really a thing yet. We’re maybe getting there, but the messaging they receive is mostly: Be very prolific.

https://culture.org/an-interview-with-ted-chiang/

So basically most people don't write S/F "just for fun", and I'm pretty sure that was never the case and all the greats and less-well-known greats of the genre were all professional writers.

Re: My experience writing and selling a short story

#145

Post by whiddershins »

corrral wrote: post #63
munificent wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Clearly the market is terrible for writers; a bit like indie game makers nowadays. See also: musicians (recording, less so live performance), DJs, photographers, journalists, documentarians, etc. Essentially any creative pursuit where: 1) Making it carries high prestige and gratification. 2) The product can be reproduced digitally and appreciated by a large audience. 3) Technology to produce it has become cheaper.…

Graeber asserts in Bullshit Jobs that when this happens—lots of people wanting these kind of creative high-prestige, high-gratification jobs—the upper echelons of the career tend to be captured by, bluntly, trust fund kids, because they're the only ones for whom a career path that involves potentially years or even decades of barely being paid is viable. Ditto editorships at prestigious publications, non-profit work,…

He probably has a point, but Graeber also ends up being pretty full of it in most cases.

Re: My experience writing and selling a short story

#146

Post by Forgeties79 »

cubesnooper wrote: post #106
Forgeties79 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who haven’t read it, Mistborn is next level. Such a great trilogy.

I’m reading the third book right now and so far the series has been a real struggle to get through. In the first two I found the setting mildly interesting, but mixed with uninteresting characters, dialogue, and plot, with writing that was entirely too verbose and with too many repetitive phrases (like “he raised an eyebrow,“ which happens about once a chapter and sometimes even multiple times per page—see also chuck…

I think it’s important to go into it knowing that it’s a piece of YA literature. What I enjoyed were the mechanics and chess game of “burning” magic, as well as characters like Sazed where there is just so much to unpack.

I also think it has a strong portrayal of complex, sustained trauma that is handled very well through the character of Vin. It’s something I think really has a great home in the YA genre while still being a fun page turner/action-y book.

I get what you’re saying, but I also just didn’t go looking for LOTR because I knew that wasn’t what this was. It’s somewhere between a fun summer fantasy series and LOTR. Not as thin as the former, not as rich as the latter. Pretty easy to chew through while also giving you something to savor.

Re: My experience writing and selling a short story

#147

Post by notahacker »

ordinaryradical wrote: post #39
m0llusk wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it seems conscientious. It is good to know if story elements are likely to trigger issues from some historical parallel or other such. This is kind of like taking a moment to consider any scientific experiment in order to check if it may approach or even exceed some moral boundaries. Everything is contextual, and these are not so much hard limits as they are social harmonics that one could tune into or reflect…

What you said I vibe with. But notice that even if it was presented in that precise context (“do you intend to invoke this theme?”) the author internalized it as story problems , hence we enter the territory of self-censorship. Also, I think it would be very optimistic to assume an editor is deploying the word “problematic” about your story as anything other than an attack on its appropriateness and validity. > where…

I think there are plenty of reasons other than self-censorship why someone choosing to write about a whole bunch of touchy political themes might think that someone interpreting a draft of their story in an entirely different light from the intended one might be a story problem rather than an editor problem. Especially if their response is to issue further drafts full of commentary on respective cultures, the virtues of national pride vs assimilation etc, not to drop it and write a story about saving the planet or talking tigers. Similarly, it might be very pessimistic to assume a review awarding a story "Editor's Choice" is an attack on its appropriateness, not great idea, but a bit liable to misinterpretation in current form

Either way, the ending the author actually ended up with feels a lot stronger than it might have been had the protagonist concluded that rosy revisionist history actually was the solution to all a nation's problems or that he couldn't possibly feel any sense of belonging in the US.

Re: My experience writing and selling a short story

#148

Post by ghaff »

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…

"For the exposure" is a dangerous path. That said, there are a ton of ways in which writing, especially non-fiction, can be a loss leader for consulting, a day job, etc. I suppose it sucks a bit for others trying to make that writing their day job but I'm hardly going to campaign for gatekeeping all public authorship to protect those in the club.

Re: My experience writing and selling a short story

#149

Post by madaxe_again »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #144
madaxe_again wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I write, purely for my own pleasure, as as you say, it’s absolutely no way to make a living. I’ve hundreds of shorts, a few dozen novellas, and a couple of novels - with which I have precisely zero interest in doing anything. Writing them was the point. This, unfortunately, has been the case practically for as long as literature has existed - very, very few authors make anything more than a pittance from their work i…

Genre fiction like S/F has different rules. In S/F you're taught to write in a way that will get you published, and paid for your work. I posted this a couple weeks ago, it's a quote from an interview with Ted Chiang: TC: I think the reaction varies, because science fiction is a more commercial genre. There are a lot more people in science fiction whose goal is to make a living from writing fiction by publishing one…

I’m not sure if that’s so, or if it’s selection bias at work - the SF&F writers you’ve heard of, whose stories actual and literary you know, are the ones who plugged away at it to make a living. What TC says is true - and it has been so for a long while. So many of the greats ground their way up through the pulps - I collected the back catalogue of Analog under its various guises as I found it rather fascinating to see authors develop chronologically — you can practically see them honing their formulae in real time.

I write SF&F for shits and giggles, as I don’t like the idea of writing things to be commercially successful, having spent much of my existence focussed on commercial success elsewhere. Rather, I write for the catharsis and the vicarious experience of crafting a world and a narrative. I don’t know that I’m alone in that, but then again, I don’t know that I’m not - but I can’t believe myself to be particularly unusual.

Re: My experience writing and selling a short story

#150

Post by [deleted] »

scaglio wrote: post #133
pipnonsense wrote: post #34

superamit (or anyone else who writes fiction really), would you publish your stories on a "substack for fiction"? I already built it, although it is in Portuguese. https://www.confabulistas.com.br It would be easy to translate to English and try it in the US market. Is there any interest for that? It is just like Substack. You create your page, people subscribe and get your fiction by email. The main difference is th…

In my opinion, that's an interesting idea. I started writing short stories a couple of years ago, and I created a Hugo website to host them: https://crooked.ink . The main issues with a blog are that it's hard to get an audience from scratch, and it's hard to be found with all the SEO effort you can do. I also tried to submit a couple of stories to webzines and I got published once for free, but I really don't think…

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