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.
My experience writing and selling a short story
81–90 of 165 posts
Re: My experience writing and selling a short story
#82Very surprised that the author was paid per word. Is that still a thing in publishing?
Re: My experience writing and selling a short story
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
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.
Re: My experience writing and selling a short story
#84Thanks to the author for sharing this experience. Interesting!
Re: My experience writing and selling a short story
#85Very surprised that the author was paid per word. Is that still a thing in publishing?
It’s as reasonable a measure as any of the level of effort / output in a work, so yes it’s common in short stories and magazine pieces afaik. I’ve heard of rates anywhere from 10 cents to a dollar per word depending on genre and publication.
Generally you’ll be given a size to fit within, so it’s not like you can go Dickens on it and crank up the word count to cover your rent.
Re: My experience writing and selling a short story
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 l…
There is no suggestion of compulsion in my comment. I’m asking that people stop hurting their fellow authors by participating in a race to the bottom, simply because they’re flattered that a for-profit corporation is willing to take their product for essentially no compensation. This has nothing to do with contributing to open-source software, working for nonprofits for a social good, etc. I do all those things. But if a business or a startup with dollar signs in their eyes wants to consult with me, or publish my work, they’re going to pay. And it’s unethical to give away your work under these circumstances.
Although I have sympathy for libertarian points of view, I think that minimum wage laws are important. Without them, you have a race to the bottom for wages for unskilled labor, resulting in widespread suffering. We don’t have minimum wage laws for writers or freelance programmers, so we have to depend on our personal ethics. Please stop giving away your product.
Re: My experience writing and selling a short story
#87Earlier 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.…
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 to Robinson Crusoe.
Re: My experience writing and selling a short story
#88Optimistic SF is retro SF. Thanks!
Re: My experience writing and selling a short story
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
> Lots of popular musicians, for instance, from very humble economic backgrounds.
Lots of musicians from humble backgrounds, but not as many popular ones today as there used to be. A lot of musicians that get big these days often have a narrative around them of coming from limited means (and some actually do) but if you dig, you often find that most had some family connection or something that massively increased the odds of their winning the popularity lottery.
> Athletes as well
Athletes don't quite apply to my model. You might think it's because their primary job is not producing digital media but winning games, but that's not true. Money flows into professional sports in large through people watching games. Sponsorships are very important too, but those trail the athlete's popularity. The athlete is essentially selling some of the popularity they have already garned through media of their games.
I think the main reason there is always a market for young skilled athletes (in sports that are popular to watch) is simply because there is almost no market for watching old games. Unlike novels, music, etc., virtually no one watches older games. So where in other forms of media, you are competing against a constantly growing corpus of existing content, in sports, the content evaporates quite quickly and needs constant refreshing.
(This might suggest that the path to success in other forms of media is by deliberately creating extremely timely content. "Here's a new song about things that happened on July 12, 2022!")
Re: My experience writing and selling a short story
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd be curious if short fiction writing was more lucrative several decades ago when literary magazines were a larger force. Was it more possible to survive as an independent writer before, or have the economics of writing always been so terrible?
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.
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