Back in 2013 I published my first book. It's a collection of "funny" texts that I wrote during my blog years. It was hard as you can imagine to publish it. Even harder to make money out of it. My publisher is from Portugal and I'm from Brazil, they sold the books in both countries. I know for a fact that some of my friends bought the book, but they never showed on the publisher spreadsheet of how many books they sold and how much I've earned. It was a proud moment of my life nevertheless, but it would be more fun if I have made some money out of it.
My experience writing and selling a short story
71–80 of 165 posts
Re: My experience writing and selling a short story
#72Earlier 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,…
Seems like there's certainly a split there. Lots of popular musicians, for instance, from very humble economic backgrounds. Athletes as well - trust fund kids don't seem, as a rule, to be single-mindedly enough focused on sports throughout their entire childhood and adolescence to hit the top tiers.
Maybe the common link between those two, and unlike some other fields, is that the work has to be put in in childhood and adolescense, when "being paid" isn't much of a thing anyway for anyone.
Re: My experience writing and selling a short story
#73It'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!
This comment confuses me. Are you saying that their pay is good for established authors, but they pay only a token amount for authors that they classify as “starting out”? Because the rates you quote are abusive. People who accept token payments for work, out of vanity or a false concept of “exposure”, damage the market for those of us who actually need to get paid for our writing. Such people are the pariahs of the…
People have many different reasons for writing. I've actually had this discussion with authors and you seem to be suggesting that people shouldn't be allowed to accept token payments for work if they aren't dependent on it directly as a full-time occupation. Are you going to ban bloggers etc. in general because they dilute the market for writing at sustainable professional rates?
Amateurs (or pros using an activity like writing in support of some other professional activity) make it more difficult for would-be pros--see also photography, people who do open source development on their own time, etc. Too bad.
Re: My experience writing and selling a short story
#74Earlier 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.
Rent as a percentage of income is remarkably steady historically because it’s always as high as the market will bear. That’s the rationale behind Georgist Land Value Taxes. You can pay it to the government and the landowner or the landowner, the amount of rent will be the same. Food has gotten cheaper as well as tastier and higher quality over time. The proportion of income spent on food has been dropping for well over 100 years.
Re: My experience writing and selling a short story
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Short stories don't make a lot of money. $100 is a huge accomplishment. The goal is usually to have them spike sales for a novel, but even there (a) it's iffy, and (b) most novels only sell a couple thousand copies. Writing, unfortunately, remains something you have to get financially comfortable to be able to do... not a way to become financially comfortable. It's surprising that even in 2022 we haven't fixed that.
> It's surprising that even in 2022 we haven't fixed that. If anything, it's much worse now than in the early 20th century. There were tons of working-class writers making a living at fiction writing, then. Tons as a proportion of the population, relative to today, anyway. Compared to then, now, nobody reads fiction. Except porn (romance novels & erotica). Only genre that's still kinda, almost doing as well as severa…
In the early 20th century written fiction had far less competition from filmed fiction, televised fiction, audio fiction, and video game fiction.
If looking at the ability to make a living off a creative pursuit we should make sure to account for the broader ways to do that today.
One thing we have done with writing (or music, or even video to some extent) is make it far easier to do as a hobby without it being a day job.
Re: My experience writing and selling a short story
#76writing 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 would say you have to be in the top 0.5% to make minimum wage as a fiction writer. If you want to write listicles, sure you don't need as much talent and you can make above minimum wage.
I'm actually skeptical that (mostly) young people writing listicles on content farms are making minimum wage--or at least much above it.
Re: My experience writing and selling a short story
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> but you can't really have a 2020s day job and be a writer, because jobs are so much more stressful.
This is disproven by the large majority of authors having a day job. Most people can’t have a day job and be a writer but the sentence is just as true as “Most people can’t be a writer.”
Re: My experience writing and selling a short story
#78It'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.
Thank you! I have not been able to get into any of his stuff for this exact reason. Interesting ideas, but I just don't give any ducks about the characters.
Re: My experience writing and selling a short story
#79superamit (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…
I'm not writing serialized fiction at the moment, so probably not for me. I'm sure others will be interested, though, especially if you can collect a community of readers around the site.
I personally will use it to also publish my short stories (in my case, very short, less than 2,000 words) and gather an audience around it, not just serialized fiction.
Re: My experience writing and selling a short story
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Short stories don't make a lot of money. $100 is a huge accomplishment. The goal is usually to have them spike sales for a novel, but even there (a) it's iffy, and (b) most novels only sell a couple thousand copies. Writing, unfortunately, remains something you have to get financially comfortable to be able to do... not a way to become financially comfortable. It's surprising that even in 2022 we haven't fixed that.
> It's surprising that even in 2022 we haven't fixed that. If anything, it's much worse now than in the early 20th century. There were tons of working-class writers making a living at fiction writing, then. Tons as a proportion of the population, relative to today, anyway. Compared to then, now, nobody reads fiction. Except porn (romance novels & erotica). Only genre that's still kinda, almost doing as well as severa…
I wonder if it’s fair to include other fiction media in that comparison. Or even fiction + nonfiction. Specifically, I’m thinking about your comment about how now, nobody reads fiction (relative to then). Should we count consuming books then to books and TV now, since TV wasn’t a thing yet? I wonder how many people make a living working in entertainment media now compared to then.