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…
Have you seen the Short Story Substack[1]? I appreciate how forthcoming the editor is with the stats. [1]: https://shortstory.substack.com/
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 s…
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…
Hey I’m making a product for self publishing. Could I ask your bother a few questions as one of the people who have successfully done it?
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…
The next time Vin eyes someone or something, my lid will blow. There's a whole lot of fingering going on as well. And on the Shattered Plains, there appears to be a rock formation every other step. I enjoy the books, but not for the prose.
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. A…
I was trying to ease the OP in, coming from Michael Crichton, not give an exhaustive list.
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. A…
I was trying to ease the OP in, coming from Michael Crichton, not give an exhaustive list. Also your list is 100% male.
James Tiptree Jr was female. But yes, most of my list is male. Would you like to propose more female writers?
Edit: if you haven't read anything from Alice Sheldon (a.k.a. James Tiptree Junior, a.k.a. Raccoona Sheldon) I wholeheartedly recommend you chase down anything of hers and read it. It is not an accident that she is first in my list because she is, for me, one of the absolute best SF authors of all time. Same for Cordwainer Smith. It is distressing to see their names having faded into obscurity, with modern readers.
> (but they wrote like, six books in a year. You need to churn them out quick to make that much money, usually in series of books, not one-offs). It helps that romance novels tend to be way on the short side. Self-published can be even shorter than the traditionally published stuff—a lot of those authors seem to get away with charging $4+ for maybe 70 pages, for each entry in their tens-of-books-long series. Much cle…
Well, my wife's first book is 90k words, so, right around the size of those thrillers (it almost was going to be 120k+ words, but it started getting too tight to the time she had booked for an editor for her liking). But you're still not wrong, in general (although 70 pages might be a bit on the low side, on average). At least her next project is going to be a novella for an anthology at around 30k words. But her nex…
Right—sorry, I guess I should have mentioned that of course there are larger entries in that genre. It's more that what's considered a salable, stand-alone work has a distribution that skews far lower than in a lot of other genres, which you can see by looking at the shelves in used book stores (and self-publishing seems to have pushed that range even lower). Didn't intend it as a judgement of the genre, to be clear, and I hope it didn't come across that way, just an observation—in fact, as noted, I think that's part of why it's practically the only genre someone can enter with a hope of maybe making some real money, these days, beyond the lottery-odds of the other genres. Even sci-fi and fantasy, which are doing much better than lit-fic and others, aren't nearly as favorable to new authors who want to make anything resembling a living at it.
How much do you earn if your short story ends up in a movie?
It can vary a lot.
If a short story is made into a movie, the first step is for the production company to secure the rights to the IP. This is usually done through an options contract, wherein the writer sells the production company the exclusive but time-limited write to make a film adaptation. When their option period expires, the production company has to either renew the option for more money, or give up on the project.
How much money an option sells for depends on the profiles of both the author and the producer/studio involved. My first option contract for short fiction was $2500 for a one year exclusive option--slightly more than I made when I published the story originally. My most recent option contract was $12,500 for an 18 month exclusivity period.
Authors with large backlists can have lots of option contracts always expiring and renewing, and often have this as a meaningful income stream even if nothing ever actually gets produced.
How much do you earn if your short story ends up in a movie?
Zero, the WGA is incentivized to keep writers out of it instead of hiring more.
Both parts of this are false.
I already replied to the parent question explaining how authors of short fiction do, in fact, make money when their work is adapted.
The WGA is a union whose members pay dues based on their writing income. The guild is incentivized to maximize their membership, and to maximize the earning of those members.
I'm an associate member of the WGAw--someone who's worked in the industry, but not done enough work yet to qualify for full membership--and I've never encountered any of the exclusionary attitude you suggest.