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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

#51

Post by cableshaft »

PuppyTailWags wrote: post #11
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 is a solid way to make money in specific genres, however, especially if one is self-published. A business-saavy writer can make a good amount of money writing romance (which makes more money than most other genres combined) or self-help.

My wife is heading down that path right now. There are people she collabs with that made $200k in their first year of writing romance novels (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).

My wife is in marketing for her day job and has been using that knowledge to help target and generate interest in her books, and it seems to be paying off, as her preorders are eclipsing quite a few established authors in the groups she's in, and this is her first book.

When she had half the preorders she does now, a friend was saying she could probably expect around $2k in sales in her first month, judging by the preorder numbers, so by the time it releases she might be seeing 2-3x or even more than that.

Re: My experience writing and selling a short story

#53

Post by ivraatiems »

dqpb wrote: post #25
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!

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

I wanted my story in print by somebody legit. Writing was not then and is not now my full time career, it's a hobby, but few things have compared to the excitement I felt when I heard I'd be published.

Many writers will advise you that it's ok to let your work go for free, if it'll get you exposure. I made a deal with myself that I'd charge something for it.

Re: My experience writing and selling a short story

#54

Post by f17 »

kleer001 wrote: post #42
superamit wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've read, people did make a living writing short stories at one point. You probably still had to write a LOT. There were many more pubs to publish to and more people bought short story anthologies.

Things like rent and food were also relatively cheaper back then too.

This is a major factor. Also, day jobs were a lot more chill. Writers still complained about having to go to an office job, but you could use the copious downtime on some of the work. You wouldn't want to do hardcore creative first-draft writing at your office job, but you could edit for typos and do background reading.

These days, so many fascistic surveillance technologies have been deployed to squeeze the downtime out of existence for most jobs. You could have a 1950s day job (well, if you were middle class) and be a writer, but you can't really have a 2020s day job and be a writer, because jobs are so much more stressful.

Re: My experience writing and selling a short story

#55

Post by BeetleB »

gizajob wrote: post #22

It's a pretty terrible, hackneyed, non-story, now I've read it. Flag me down all you like. Seems like the author is more interested in the stats about writing than the actual writing. Some simple advice would be to read some Neal Stephenson, Paul Auster, and China Mieville for starters, not Michael Crichton. Good writing is a serious art and craft. It's irrelevant how many hours a specific work takes down to the seco…

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.

Re: My experience writing and selling a short story

#56

Post by munificent »

keyle wrote: post #28
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!

These figures are interesting for me. One day of contracting dwarfs that. You'd have to be absolutely passionate and have another income to do this, which is a shame. I think every craft should have its place. Clearly the market is terrible for writers; a bit like indie game makers nowadays. I hope you get a breakthrough though; because if you keep doing this, you're clearly passionate about your craft!

> 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.

The basic market forces are sucking all the money out of it. I think it's good for a society for skilled creative people to be able to spend most of their time on their art instead of having to do it as a side gig. But we don't seem to have an economic system that currently supports it aside from a small number of lucky winners of the zeitgeist lottery.

Re: My experience writing and selling a short story

#57

Post by thrown_22 »

m0llusk wrote: post #35
ordinaryradical wrote: post #33

Did anyone find it curious that the revision process highlights perceived moral impurities (immigrant deportation commentary, MAGA similarity) as story failures / problems? There’s a profound sub-narrative here on self-censorship, what is or isn’t acceptable within the bounds of fiction, and how genre in-groups police themselves toward Acceptable Messages.

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…

Yeah, no.

I'm an award winning published author and wokeness has taken over the publishing space to the point where you can't publish _anything_ negative about a few sacred cows, which are obvious to anyone with a working brain.

I'll bet my bottom dollar it was a white woman lecturing to a brown man why he's being racist too.

Re: My experience writing and selling a short story

#58

Post by corrral »

cableshaft wrote: post #51
PuppyTailWags wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing is a solid way to make money in specific genres, however, especially if one is self-published. A business-saavy writer can make a good amount of money writing romance (which makes more money than most other genres combined) or self-help.

My wife is heading down that path right now. There are people she collabs with that made $200k in their first year of writing romance novels (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). My wife is in marketing for her day job and has been using that knowledge to help target and generate interest in her books, and it see…

> (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 clearer path to some reasonable return than writing 350+ page thrillers or big ol' fantasy doorstops.

Re: My experience writing and selling a short story

#59

Post by neilpanchal »

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

Similarly, I wish I could design typefaces for a living, but it is simply not realistic. It would be a dream to do it full time; ecstasy to me.
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