14 ms·

My experience writing and selling a short story

266 points by superamit 4y ago

paulpauper 4y ago
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
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  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.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I'm actually skeptical that (mostly) young people writing listicles on content farms are making minimum wage--or at least much above it.
    - anonwriter42 4y ago
      I've met people who've worked at these. They pay more than 25 dollars. Around a couple hundred. If you don't live in a third world country you can't afford this lifestyle, which leads to the poor quality you see due to lack of English proficiency. Nowadays, the content farm has become websites like Webcomics and Webnovels which offer a variety of tools for authors to be able to make a living. In reality like the pre-existing mangaka business, you will never be able to have a stable amount of money each year as you struggle to keep afloat you cannot improve or get better. The game has been rigged by the publishers since the 80s. And only the very elite are given the opportunity to succeed in the correct social circles. For which most people will never be given the opportunity to even partake in. You can apply for workshops and the naught but if you aren't from the right family or friends with the right people your chances are close to none. It's the same in the music industry and pervades everywhere even in technology.
- ghaff 4y ago
  And I'd say that was a pretty good result overall. For what may be more relatable to many here, publishing a technical (or tech-adjacent, i.e. more popular industry takes of various kinds) book may be career-enhancing, even significantly so, in various ways. But you still will likely just make a few $K in direct moneys.I did a book about open source history/business models/etc. and it's been good--even was asked to do a second edition/done book signings at event/etc.--but still only made single-digit thousands of dollars directly.
  - VBprogrammer 4y ago
    Appreciate that you probably didn't want to be accused of shameless promotion but I'm genuinely interested; what is the name of your book?
    - ghaff 4y ago
      How Open Source Ate Software (from Apress)--think it's on Safari. I've done book signings at Linux Foundation events and it's led to me doing a number of internal projects that probably wouldn't have happened otherwise.
- ozim 4y ago
  Like all the "jobs" that should be done by people who don't need money to sustain themselves so kids of rich parents or self made people after they hit it big. But it goes with all content creators - sports - academia, getting PHD or Professor title. Funny thing is that a lot of people try to become boxers or writers, football players as it seems easy to "make it" but I don't know if there is "car sports" rags to riches stories, to do car sports one has to be quite on the rich side anyway. But still to go path of Mike Tyson you still have to be .5% talent and work ethic and for quite some time getting scraps as payments.
- sammalloy 4y ago
  > 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.
  - nibbleshifter 4y ago
    Most of the musicians I know make the bulk of their music-related income from private tutoring, its what funds the rest of it. They usually also will have a day job of some sort. Recording and producing music, making music videos, etc is a massive cost center that may or may not break even. Usually not. Playing live gigs is usually a money loser for most - venues often have extremely unfavourable terms (especially when starting out - a lot of places are pay to play, where you have to market and sell the tickets and at best get to keep what's left over after venue hire is covered). The real money is basically in teaching the offspring of upper middle class people how to play an instrument.
    - sammalloy 4y ago
      > The real money is basically in teaching the offspring of upper middle class people how to play an instrument. Agreed, but even then it’s bordering on low income. I saw an article a while back that claimed some musicians were making big money giving lessons online, but I never followed up on it. Apparently the really good ones could reach a larger pool of more potential students and double or triple their income.
  - anonwriter42 4y ago
    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 most writers never improve. It's just how it works in the end because of the lack of a coherent structure or guidance system. Only if you belong to pre-established writing groups will you even really have a chance at learning it. Sure there are several references openly available online, but all it can teach you is syntax. What you need to be a good writer is experience, training and mentoring which most people will never gain the opportunity of having. And even to those that do, it's a lifelong endeavor and one that requires complex knowledge in a variety of fields. It's one that most that pick it up will never be able to comprehend themselves or when they do, it's too late and trying to do so is fundamentally impossible for them due to their situation.
- oauch 4y ago
  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?
  - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
    You could in the past have made a career writing exclusively short fiction. Over time, however, short fiction became understood as a stepping stone towards novel writing where the "real money" was. However I would never call writing short fiction lucrative in any sense, not even if you're Ted Chiang.
  - superamit 4y ago
    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.
    - meheleventyone 4y ago
      Back in the pulp era it was common for authors to churn out books under multiple names. There’s definitely a bit of that (including the questionable quality) in the self-publishing market but it’s much less visible.
    - kleer001 4y ago
      Things like rent and food were also relatively cheaper back then too.
      - f17 4y ago
        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.
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  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.
  - nibbleshifter 4y ago
    A former manager of mine had a whole side gig writing direct-to-kindle romance and erotica for quite a while. Not bad money in it either.
    - kleer001 4y ago
      Those two seem like the best time:money ratio genres. Lots of turn over, lots of fans with pretty forgiving quality filters. I'd be happy selling my one book fairly well. Though I keep hearing that it's series and series of series that do the best.
  - cableshaft 4y ago
    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.
    - corrral 4y ago
      > (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.
- dageshi 4y ago
  There are more options than the past depending on genre niche and whether you're trying to entertain or write "literary works". For various genres of the fantasy genre there's a fairly well trodden road nowadays of going from royalroad.com (with patreon) to Kindle/Kindle Unlimited. royalroad.com lets people build massive followings and then translate them into patreon and other monetisation. The audiences in the litrpg space right now are voracious and are fairly forgiving of typo's/grammar so long as they enjoy the story. I'm not sure the same could've been said 10 or even 5 years ago. But again it's fairly genre specific.
  - ricardobeat 4y ago
    Fascinating stuff. I had no idea people were reading (or producing) “literary RPG”. It’s like peeking into an alternative world: > I… finally did it! And I also leveled as a [Demon Larva] thanks to the experience gained from leveling [Identification]! It was a total success! > I could distribute my Stat Points and Skill Point later. For now, I focused on what was important. I glanced at the pebble closest to me and activated my [Identification]—
    - dageshi 4y ago
      Yeah, it's a rapidly expanding an evolving genre with its own conventions and quite a bit of influence from Chinese webnovels and anime. Your average litrpg usually involves a System Apocalypse or an Isekai Protagonist. System Apocalypse - God like Magical Computer "System" that tracks peoples stats/skills, recognises their feats and rewards them arrives on earth and integrates the world into "The System" usually in the form of a magical cli gui that appears in peoples vision as they go about their day. Isekai - Average person going about their business dies in an accident and is reincarnated on another (magical) world with memories of their past life intact.
- diob 4y ago
  Yeah, I remember a study they did with music where they separated groups and in each group different bands would come to dominate based on luck (whoever got momentum first). Wish I could find it, it was quite a time ago.
  - sammalloy 4y ago
    > Yeah, I remember a study they did with music where they separated groups and in each group different bands would come to dominate based on luck (whoever got momentum first). Wish I could find it, it was quite a time ago. I’m not familiar with that study, and I try to keep up with the literature. You might be very interested to read about the historical rise of the grunge genre as an example of the kind of luck you are talking about. There was definitely a magical kind of serendipity at work between all the different musicians and bands who were up and coming at the time. Some of the one on one interviews with the key players are amazing. If they didn’t pick up a certain phone call or move to a specific city or play music with this one person, entire careers would never have been made.
- neilpanchal 4y ago
  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.
- asicsp 4y ago
  >writing has to be among the worst ways to make money, sorry to say Depends. I left my high paying job and had mostly burned through my savings until selling programming ebooks saved me. Not saying that writing was the best option, but it was the first that started paying my bills consistently. Of course, the fact that my monthly expenses was around $150 helped a lot. I've now written 12 books and the past two years has brought my savings back to a comfortable level.
- madaxe_again 4y ago
  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 in their lifetimes, and historically a majority of authors were the scions of wealthy or at least comfortably middle class families. Now, thankfully, the publishing landscape is substantially more democratic, however the financial hurdles to being an author remain very real - it’s a side job, out of necessity, until you get published - and then it’s still probably a side job. So, yes, it’s a labour of love. I don’t think anyone goes into writing to make bank, but rather because they have an insatiable urge to write, or to convey an idea, or whatever it may be - but financial success doesn’t weigh into it - in fact, for most, it’s an expensive hobby, insofar as it’s rather time consuming. Me, I just write whilst babysitting my telescope through the nights. Keeps the fingers warm.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
    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/ 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.
    - 4y ago
PuppyTailWags 4y ago
This is an excellent view on how writing speculative fiction actually works. Amit's publication to Tor should be lauded as a serious achievement in his career and not something that an average person could reasonably expect to achieve/plan for. Congratulations to him. Please consider reading the work itself here: https://www.tor.com/2022/06/01/india-world-amit-gupta/ https://www.tor.com/2022/06/01/india-world-amit-gupta/
- Hayvok 4y ago
  Agreed, Tor is a very respected publishing house in the sci-fi/fantasy genres. He’s joining company with works like Enders Game, Wheel of Time, Mistborn, and Stormlight Archive, and a dozen more I’m not able to remember off the top of my head.
  - Forgeties79 4y ago
    For those who haven’t read it, Mistborn is next level. Such a great trilogy.
    - cubesnooper 4y ago
      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 chuckling, rolling eyes, and snorting, which occur at about the same frequency). Clearly not everybody finds this irritating but I definitely did. I don’t think I had any problems like that with the writing of other fantasy series like Lord of the Rings and A Game of Thrones. Nor with two other trilogies I read for the first time this year, C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy and The Three‐Body Problem.
      - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
        You might like the Machineries of Empire series instead- fascinating world building with serious depth of character and personal stakes. First book is Ninefox Gambit.
ivraatiems 4y ago
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!
- dqpb 4y ago
  I don't understand why you would sell for that amount.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Because that's the market rate. The alternative is not to sell.
  - spoonjim 4y ago
    To get people to read what you’ve written.
  - corrral 4y ago
    Wait until you see the lit-fic market.
  - f17 4y ago
    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 political (traditional publishing) and no one knows what's seriously good until it's been around for ~20 years.
    - BMc2020 4y ago
      You don't do it for the money. *DANGER WILL ROBINSON DANGER*
eloff 4y ago
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 able to carve out his own path in life, in the developing world, against adversity. https://www.amazon.com/Jasper-T.-Scott/e/B00B7A2CT4%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share https://www.amazon.com/Jasper-T.-Scott/e/B00B7A2CT4%3Fref=db...
- superamit 4y ago
  30+ novels! Very impressive. How long did it take him to get to 1 million copies sold, and was there anything he did along the way that had an outsized impact on his success?
  - eloff 4y ago
    He's been writing for about 12 years, and he crossed the million threshold at least two years ago - so about a decade. I'm not sure about the answer to the second question, I'll ask him over a beer next time we get together. I would say that an important factor was investing in professional cover art, editing, etc. He also more or less timed the rise of Kindle books, quite by accident, and I think that also helped his career. But there's no substitute for caring about his work and putting in the time, which he definitely does.
- ankaAr 4y ago
  Wow, just wow. And thank you to share your brother's work. You don't need to say you are proud of your brother, I can see that in your words.
- jotato 4y ago
  I want to read one of his books. What is your recommendation for a book lover (although a casual sci-fi reader at best)
  - 4y ago
Havoc 4y ago
Nice! Purchased a copy. For those looking you need to add author name - doesn't show up with just title on amazon Haven't seen this before: >this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
- superamit 4y ago
  Wow, thanks! TBH I didn't even know Tor was selling it as a Kindle single for 99 cents. And DRM-free! Cool. Feel free to pirate, I guess.
- pacaro 4y ago
  Tor books are all DRM free, and have been for a while. It's nice to be able to archive purchases. Also when using an ereader where artwork isn't always very accessible you can just open the zip file and look at it with a better image viewer. A particular bonus when artwork is really good, or if printing out a map will make reading more enjoyable etc
- egypturnash 4y ago
  Tor’s been selling their stuff DRM-free for about as long as ebooks have existed.
gizajob 4y ago
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 second. The author seems to think writing is hard and slow. It is slow, but after the first decade or two it gets quicker when the inspiration comes.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- m0llusk 4y ago
  My guess is he was going after some subtle points that are not normally the focus in this genre, so for many readers it is going to come across as hollow.
- corrral 4y ago
  > Some simple advice would be to read some Neal Stephenson, Paul Auster, and China Mieville for starters, not Michael Crichton. I'd love for fiction writing to be better, generally, but if you're looking to make a career of writing—which of those made/makes the most money? [EDIT] Incidentally, I'd put Stephenson on about the same level as Crichton. Worse in some respects, better in others.
  - gizajob 4y ago
    I wasn't recommending Tolstoy or Shakespeare for a reason... Why does "making money" have anything to do with producing art or working on a craft you love? Virtually every fine artist we now regard as a genius didn't make real money in their lifetime. The people selling their art retroactively make the money.
- BeetleB 4y ago
  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.
ordinaryradical 4y ago
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.
- m0llusk 4y ago
  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 as well as avoid.
  - ordinaryradical 4y ago
    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 an eloquently written editorial review argued that it had problematic themes.
    - notahacker 4y ago
      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.
pipnonsense 4y ago
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 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 that people can read your books from the beginning, from the first chapter, in installments. With Substack (or any newsletter platform) new people can only get the future emails from the time they subscribed. In my site people will receive the first installment/chapter of the book (you can have several books published in there, one can be "Short stories"). It has the "paid subscribers" feature also. I built it mostly to myself, as I am starting a side-career as a fiction writer wanted to own my audience. Fiction writers currently don't have a good platform to both distribute their work and gather an audience. What I built does the job pretty well I think. Any interest?
- f17 4y ago
  I'm someone else, but I just wanted to say: I hope your project succeeds. I've thought about this for a long time and have a lot of insight into the problem, and thoughts about the pitfalls. If you'd like to talk, post an email address (can be throwaway) and I'll reach out. I'm a novelist myself, with a book coming out in early '23. The most important thing, over the next 20 years, is making sure that the self-publishing ecosystem isn't controlled or controllable by companies (e.g., Amazon). Amazon are currently the good guys (believe it or not) relative to traditional publishers [1] and chain bookstores, but God knows what they are doing with their algorithm, and we can't let them become a SPOF for the self-publishing ecosystem. ---- [1] Actually, the editors at the publishing houses themselves are a pretty good set of people (and, at least in the US, very underpaid). It's the rest of the trad-pub ecosystem--the tastemakers, the literary agents, the various sausage-makers who decide which books get celebrity endorsements--who can eat a bowl of taint cancer.
  - pipnonsense 4y ago
    I appreciate the offer! I definitely would like to hear your thoughts. You can email me at contato [at] confabulistas.com.br Thanks!
ankaAr 4y ago
Nice story!!
- superamit 4y ago
  Thank you!
wslh 4y ago
How much do you earn if your short story ends up in a movie?
- anonwriter42 4y ago
  Zero, the WGA is incentivized to keep writers out of it instead of hiring more.
  - glorioushubris 4y ago
    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.
- glorioushubris 4y ago
  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.
radiojasper 4y ago
You made a bit over 1k. 3 years of effort for 1.4k. You failed.
atum47 4y ago
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.
vincentmarle 4y ago
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.
- spookybones 4y ago
  Are they actual facts or joke facts? If jokes, did you have to worry about source material? Also, did you have to get permission from Norris' agency?
- LaundroMat 4y ago
  Do you have more about this? Where did you print the book and where are you selling it?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
paxys 4y ago
Very surprised that the author was paid per word. Is that still a thing in publishing?
- avk 4y ago
  Yes, but it depends on where you submit. I've seen literary journals pay in contributor copies (aka nothing), token amounts—a few dollars, a rate per page, or a fixed rate up front. Genres like sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and crime or mystery are more likely to pay per word. Not sure why that is.
- aaronharnly 4y ago
  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.
RickJWagner 4y ago
Thanks to the author for sharing this experience. Interesting!
no-s 4y ago
Optimistic SF is retro SF. Thanks!
Barrera 4y ago
> I spent 22 hours, 18 minutes, and 47 seconds writing and editing “India World” across 42 sessions in Google Docs. (Not including hours more spent editing on paper, revising the story at workshops, or reading critiques.) Given the quality of the work, I suspect that 2x-5x that many hours were spent on developing and revising the story (the parenthetical part). So let's call it 66 hours total. Later: > 8/27/2020 - RUOXI FROM TOR.COM EMAILED TO BUY THE STORY! They offered $1422.80 for exclusive digital, audio, and ebook rights for one year, non-exclusive afterward. Likely publication: early 2021. I said yes! So, ballpark $20/hr. Some commenters have noted the low pay for this kind of work. How it's a labor of love rather than a living. And Tor apparently pays top dollar. On top of the fee, there's a profit sharing program, which starts to sound pretty good. But again, this looks to be the ceiling. What's more interesting are the non-financial terms. The author can sell the work to others after one year. Depending on whether the author retains copyright (seems to be implied), this could be a pretty interesting way to go. I'm thinking about things like expansion into a novel, movie or other derivative works, for example. The acceptance letter doesn't quite make it clear how this works. How does it work?
- jamesjyu 4y ago
  Yep for any reputable publication, the rights revert to the author after some reasonable amount of time. Then they can sell option rights or expand etc however they see fit. (If a pub asks for rights in perpetuity be VERY wary!) Optioning for TV or film is usually the most lucrative, but can be very difficult, especially for new writers breaking into the field. This is especially true for short stories. One big exception is Arrival, which was based on Ted Chiang’s short story, which have paved the way for other short stories to get optioned in similar fashion.
georgeoliver 4y ago
I'm curious about the stats for SF readers/writers/publishers. As the parent post relates, compared to the past there are a lot less publishers and it would be extremely difficult to be a professional SF short story writer as your sole occupation. Has the pool of writers grown or stayed the same? What about readers?
avk 4y ago
Congrats to superamit! Well done with your persistence and I hope Uncanny is receptive to your future submissions. I'm excited to read the story. Disclaimer: light self-promo. Are others interested in more publishing posts like these? I've documented the journey to publication stories with stats, rejections, and a sense of the work involved for most of the short fiction I've published in literary journals. It's been cathartic and encouraging to share the entire process. My most notable piece[1] ended up making it into The Best American Mystery Stories[2] a few years ago. [1]: https://arsenalofwords.com/2018/10/30/how-loathing-travel-public-transit-a-tuscan-residency-24-rejections-and-a-writing-conference-led-to-my-first-published-short-story/ https://arsenalofwords.com/2018/10/30/how-loathing-travel-pu... [2]: https://arsenalofwords.com/2019/10/01/how-a-regional-writing-conference-led-to-publication-in-the-best-american-mystery-stories-2019/ https://arsenalofwords.com/2019/10/01/how-a-regional-writing...

266 points by superamit 4y ago

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

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
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.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I'm actually skeptical that (mostly) young people writing listicles on content farms are making minimum wage--or at least much above it.
  - anonwriter42 4y ago
    I've met people who've worked at these. They pay more than 25 dollars. Around a couple hundred. If you don't live in a third world country you can't afford this lifestyle, which leads to the poor quality you see due to lack of English proficiency. Nowadays, the content farm has become websites like Webcomics and Webnovels which offer a variety of tools for authors to be able to make a living. In reality like the pre-existing mangaka business, you will never be able to have a stable amount of money each year as you struggle to keep afloat you cannot improve or get better. The game has been rigged by the publishers since the 80s. And only the very elite are given the opportunity to succeed in the correct social circles. For which most people will never be given the opportunity to even partake in. You can apply for workshops and the naught but if you aren't from the right family or friends with the right people your chances are close to none. It's the same in the music industry and pervades everywhere even in technology.
ghaff 4y ago
And I'd say that was a pretty good result overall. For what may be more relatable to many here, publishing a technical (or tech-adjacent, i.e. more popular industry takes of various kinds) book may be career-enhancing, even significantly so, in various ways. But you still will likely just make a few $K in direct moneys.I did a book about open source history/business models/etc. and it's been good--even was asked to do a second edition/done book signings at event/etc.--but still only made single-digit thousands of dollars directly.
- VBprogrammer 4y ago
  Appreciate that you probably didn't want to be accused of shameless promotion but I'm genuinely interested; what is the name of your book?
  - ghaff 4y ago
    How Open Source Ate Software (from Apress)--think it's on Safari. I've done book signings at Linux Foundation events and it's led to me doing a number of internal projects that probably wouldn't have happened otherwise.
ozim 4y ago
Like all the "jobs" that should be done by people who don't need money to sustain themselves so kids of rich parents or self made people after they hit it big. But it goes with all content creators - sports - academia, getting PHD or Professor title. Funny thing is that a lot of people try to become boxers or writers, football players as it seems easy to "make it" but I don't know if there is "car sports" rags to riches stories, to do car sports one has to be quite on the rich side anyway. But still to go path of Mike Tyson you still have to be .5% talent and work ethic and for quite some time getting scraps as payments.
sammalloy 4y ago
> 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.
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  Most of the musicians I know make the bulk of their music-related income from private tutoring, its what funds the rest of it. They usually also will have a day job of some sort. Recording and producing music, making music videos, etc is a massive cost center that may or may not break even. Usually not. Playing live gigs is usually a money loser for most - venues often have extremely unfavourable terms (especially when starting out - a lot of places are pay to play, where you have to market and sell the tickets and at best get to keep what's left over after venue hire is covered). The real money is basically in teaching the offspring of upper middle class people how to play an instrument.
  - sammalloy 4y ago
    > The real money is basically in teaching the offspring of upper middle class people how to play an instrument. Agreed, but even then it’s bordering on low income. I saw an article a while back that claimed some musicians were making big money giving lessons online, but I never followed up on it. Apparently the really good ones could reach a larger pool of more potential students and double or triple their income.
- anonwriter42 4y ago
  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 most writers never improve. It's just how it works in the end because of the lack of a coherent structure or guidance system. Only if you belong to pre-established writing groups will you even really have a chance at learning it. Sure there are several references openly available online, but all it can teach you is syntax. What you need to be a good writer is experience, training and mentoring which most people will never gain the opportunity of having. And even to those that do, it's a lifelong endeavor and one that requires complex knowledge in a variety of fields. It's one that most that pick it up will never be able to comprehend themselves or when they do, it's too late and trying to do so is fundamentally impossible for them due to their situation.
oauch 4y ago
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?
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  You could in the past have made a career writing exclusively short fiction. Over time, however, short fiction became understood as a stepping stone towards novel writing where the "real money" was. However I would never call writing short fiction lucrative in any sense, not even if you're Ted Chiang.
- superamit 4y ago
  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.
  - meheleventyone 4y ago
    Back in the pulp era it was common for authors to churn out books under multiple names. There’s definitely a bit of that (including the questionable quality) in the self-publishing market but it’s much less visible.
  - kleer001 4y ago
    Things like rent and food were also relatively cheaper back then too.
    - f17 4y ago
      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.
PuppyTailWags 4y ago
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.
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  A former manager of mine had a whole side gig writing direct-to-kindle romance and erotica for quite a while. Not bad money in it either.
  - kleer001 4y ago
    Those two seem like the best time:money ratio genres. Lots of turn over, lots of fans with pretty forgiving quality filters. I'd be happy selling my one book fairly well. Though I keep hearing that it's series and series of series that do the best.
- cableshaft 4y ago
  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.
  - corrral 4y ago
    > (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.
dageshi 4y ago
There are more options than the past depending on genre niche and whether you're trying to entertain or write "literary works". For various genres of the fantasy genre there's a fairly well trodden road nowadays of going from royalroad.com (with patreon) to Kindle/Kindle Unlimited. royalroad.com lets people build massive followings and then translate them into patreon and other monetisation. The audiences in the litrpg space right now are voracious and are fairly forgiving of typo's/grammar so long as they enjoy the story. I'm not sure the same could've been said 10 or even 5 years ago. But again it's fairly genre specific.
- ricardobeat 4y ago
  Fascinating stuff. I had no idea people were reading (or producing) “literary RPG”. It’s like peeking into an alternative world: > I… finally did it! And I also leveled as a [Demon Larva] thanks to the experience gained from leveling [Identification]! It was a total success! > I could distribute my Stat Points and Skill Point later. For now, I focused on what was important. I glanced at the pebble closest to me and activated my [Identification]—
  - dageshi 4y ago
    Yeah, it's a rapidly expanding an evolving genre with its own conventions and quite a bit of influence from Chinese webnovels and anime. Your average litrpg usually involves a System Apocalypse or an Isekai Protagonist. System Apocalypse - God like Magical Computer "System" that tracks peoples stats/skills, recognises their feats and rewards them arrives on earth and integrates the world into "The System" usually in the form of a magical cli gui that appears in peoples vision as they go about their day. Isekai - Average person going about their business dies in an accident and is reincarnated on another (magical) world with memories of their past life intact.
diob 4y ago
Yeah, I remember a study they did with music where they separated groups and in each group different bands would come to dominate based on luck (whoever got momentum first). Wish I could find it, it was quite a time ago.
- sammalloy 4y ago
  > Yeah, I remember a study they did with music where they separated groups and in each group different bands would come to dominate based on luck (whoever got momentum first). Wish I could find it, it was quite a time ago. I’m not familiar with that study, and I try to keep up with the literature. You might be very interested to read about the historical rise of the grunge genre as an example of the kind of luck you are talking about. There was definitely a magical kind of serendipity at work between all the different musicians and bands who were up and coming at the time. Some of the one on one interviews with the key players are amazing. If they didn’t pick up a certain phone call or move to a specific city or play music with this one person, entire careers would never have been made.
neilpanchal 4y ago
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.
asicsp 4y ago
>writing has to be among the worst ways to make money, sorry to say Depends. I left my high paying job and had mostly burned through my savings until selling programming ebooks saved me. Not saying that writing was the best option, but it was the first that started paying my bills consistently. Of course, the fact that my monthly expenses was around $150 helped a lot. I've now written 12 books and the past two years has brought my savings back to a comfortable level.
madaxe_again 4y ago
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 in their lifetimes, and historically a majority of authors were the scions of wealthy or at least comfortably middle class families. Now, thankfully, the publishing landscape is substantially more democratic, however the financial hurdles to being an author remain very real - it’s a side job, out of necessity, until you get published - and then it’s still probably a side job. So, yes, it’s a labour of love. I don’t think anyone goes into writing to make bank, but rather because they have an insatiable urge to write, or to convey an idea, or whatever it may be - but financial success doesn’t weigh into it - in fact, for most, it’s an expensive hobby, insofar as it’s rather time consuming. Me, I just write whilst babysitting my telescope through the nights. Keeps the fingers warm.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  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/ 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.
  - 4y ago

PuppyTailWags 4y ago

This is an excellent view on how writing speculative fiction actually works. Amit's publication to Tor should be lauded as a serious achievement in his career and not something that an average person could reasonably expect to achieve/plan for. Congratulations to him. Please consider reading the work itself here: https://www.tor.com/2022/06/01/india-world-amit-gupta/ https://www.tor.com/2022/06/01/india-world-amit-gupta/

Hayvok 4y ago
Agreed, Tor is a very respected publishing house in the sci-fi/fantasy genres. He’s joining company with works like Enders Game, Wheel of Time, Mistborn, and Stormlight Archive, and a dozen more I’m not able to remember off the top of my head.
- Forgeties79 4y ago
  For those who haven’t read it, Mistborn is next level. Such a great trilogy.
  - cubesnooper 4y ago
    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 chuckling, rolling eyes, and snorting, which occur at about the same frequency). Clearly not everybody finds this irritating but I definitely did. I don’t think I had any problems like that with the writing of other fantasy series like Lord of the Rings and A Game of Thrones. Nor with two other trilogies I read for the first time this year, C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy and The Three‐Body Problem.
    - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
      You might like the Machineries of Empire series instead- fascinating world building with serious depth of character and personal stakes. First book is Ninefox Gambit.

ivraatiems 4y ago

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!

dqpb 4y ago
I don't understand why you would sell for that amount.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Because that's the market rate. The alternative is not to sell.
- spoonjim 4y ago
  To get people to read what you’ve written.
- corrral 4y ago
  Wait until you see the lit-fic market.
- f17 4y ago
  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 political (traditional publishing) and no one knows what's seriously good until it's been around for ~20 years.
  - BMc2020 4y ago
    You don't do it for the money. *DANGER WILL ROBINSON DANGER*

eloff 4y ago

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 able to carve out his own path in life, in the developing world, against adversity. https://www.amazon.com/Jasper-T.-Scott/e/B00B7A2CT4%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share https://www.amazon.com/Jasper-T.-Scott/e/B00B7A2CT4%3Fref=db...

superamit 4y ago
30+ novels! Very impressive. How long did it take him to get to 1 million copies sold, and was there anything he did along the way that had an outsized impact on his success?
- eloff 4y ago
  He's been writing for about 12 years, and he crossed the million threshold at least two years ago - so about a decade. I'm not sure about the answer to the second question, I'll ask him over a beer next time we get together. I would say that an important factor was investing in professional cover art, editing, etc. He also more or less timed the rise of Kindle books, quite by accident, and I think that also helped his career. But there's no substitute for caring about his work and putting in the time, which he definitely does.
ankaAr 4y ago
Wow, just wow. And thank you to share your brother's work. You don't need to say you are proud of your brother, I can see that in your words.
jotato 4y ago
I want to read one of his books. What is your recommendation for a book lover (although a casual sci-fi reader at best)
- 4y ago

Havoc 4y ago

Nice! Purchased a copy. For those looking you need to add author name - doesn't show up with just title on amazon Haven't seen this before: >this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

superamit 4y ago
Wow, thanks! TBH I didn't even know Tor was selling it as a Kindle single for 99 cents. And DRM-free! Cool. Feel free to pirate, I guess.
pacaro 4y ago
Tor books are all DRM free, and have been for a while. It's nice to be able to archive purchases. Also when using an ereader where artwork isn't always very accessible you can just open the zip file and look at it with a better image viewer. A particular bonus when artwork is really good, or if printing out a map will make reading more enjoyable etc
egypturnash 4y ago
Tor’s been selling their stuff DRM-free for about as long as ebooks have existed.

gizajob 4y ago

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 second. The author seems to think writing is hard and slow. It is slow, but after the first decade or two it gets quicker when the inspiration comes.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
m0llusk 4y ago
My guess is he was going after some subtle points that are not normally the focus in this genre, so for many readers it is going to come across as hollow.
corrral 4y ago
> Some simple advice would be to read some Neal Stephenson, Paul Auster, and China Mieville for starters, not Michael Crichton. I'd love for fiction writing to be better, generally, but if you're looking to make a career of writing—which of those made/makes the most money? [EDIT] Incidentally, I'd put Stephenson on about the same level as Crichton. Worse in some respects, better in others.
- gizajob 4y ago
  I wasn't recommending Tolstoy or Shakespeare for a reason... Why does "making money" have anything to do with producing art or working on a craft you love? Virtually every fine artist we now regard as a genius didn't make real money in their lifetime. The people selling their art retroactively make the money.
BeetleB 4y ago
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.

ordinaryradical 4y ago

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.

m0llusk 4y ago
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 as well as avoid.
- ordinaryradical 4y ago
  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 an eloquently written editorial review argued that it had problematic themes.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    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.

pipnonsense 4y ago

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 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 that people can read your books from the beginning, from the first chapter, in installments. With Substack (or any newsletter platform) new people can only get the future emails from the time they subscribed. In my site people will receive the first installment/chapter of the book (you can have several books published in there, one can be "Short stories"). It has the "paid subscribers" feature also. I built it mostly to myself, as I am starting a side-career as a fiction writer wanted to own my audience. Fiction writers currently don't have a good platform to both distribute their work and gather an audience. What I built does the job pretty well I think. Any interest?

f17 4y ago
I'm someone else, but I just wanted to say: I hope your project succeeds. I've thought about this for a long time and have a lot of insight into the problem, and thoughts about the pitfalls. If you'd like to talk, post an email address (can be throwaway) and I'll reach out. I'm a novelist myself, with a book coming out in early '23. The most important thing, over the next 20 years, is making sure that the self-publishing ecosystem isn't controlled or controllable by companies (e.g., Amazon). Amazon are currently the good guys (believe it or not) relative to traditional publishers [1] and chain bookstores, but God knows what they are doing with their algorithm, and we can't let them become a SPOF for the self-publishing ecosystem. ---- [1] Actually, the editors at the publishing houses themselves are a pretty good set of people (and, at least in the US, very underpaid). It's the rest of the trad-pub ecosystem--the tastemakers, the literary agents, the various sausage-makers who decide which books get celebrity endorsements--who can eat a bowl of taint cancer.
- pipnonsense 4y ago
  I appreciate the offer! I definitely would like to hear your thoughts. You can email me at contato [at] confabulistas.com.br Thanks!

ankaAr 4y ago

Nice story!!

superamit 4y ago
Thank you!

wslh 4y ago

How much do you earn if your short story ends up in a movie?

anonwriter42 4y ago
Zero, the WGA is incentivized to keep writers out of it instead of hiring more.
- glorioushubris 4y ago
  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.
glorioushubris 4y ago
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.

radiojasper 4y ago

You made a bit over 1k. 3 years of effort for 1.4k. You failed.

atum47 4y ago

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.

vincentmarle 4y ago

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.

spookybones 4y ago
Are they actual facts or joke facts? If jokes, did you have to worry about source material? Also, did you have to get permission from Norris' agency?
LaundroMat 4y ago
Do you have more about this? Where did you print the book and where are you selling it?
deleted 4y ago
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paxys 4y ago

Very surprised that the author was paid per word. Is that still a thing in publishing?

avk 4y ago
Yes, but it depends on where you submit. I've seen literary journals pay in contributor copies (aka nothing), token amounts—a few dollars, a rate per page, or a fixed rate up front. Genres like sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and crime or mystery are more likely to pay per word. Not sure why that is.
aaronharnly 4y ago
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.

RickJWagner 4y ago

Thanks to the author for sharing this experience. Interesting!

no-s 4y ago

Optimistic SF is retro SF. Thanks!

Barrera 4y ago

> I spent 22 hours, 18 minutes, and 47 seconds writing and editing “India World” across 42 sessions in Google Docs. (Not including hours more spent editing on paper, revising the story at workshops, or reading critiques.) Given the quality of the work, I suspect that 2x-5x that many hours were spent on developing and revising the story (the parenthetical part). So let's call it 66 hours total. Later: > 8/27/2020 - RUOXI FROM TOR.COM EMAILED TO BUY THE STORY! They offered $1422.80 for exclusive digital, audio, and ebook rights for one year, non-exclusive afterward. Likely publication: early 2021. I said yes! So, ballpark $20/hr. Some commenters have noted the low pay for this kind of work. How it's a labor of love rather than a living. And Tor apparently pays top dollar. On top of the fee, there's a profit sharing program, which starts to sound pretty good. But again, this looks to be the ceiling. What's more interesting are the non-financial terms. The author can sell the work to others after one year. Depending on whether the author retains copyright (seems to be implied), this could be a pretty interesting way to go. I'm thinking about things like expansion into a novel, movie or other derivative works, for example. The acceptance letter doesn't quite make it clear how this works. How does it work?

jamesjyu 4y ago
Yep for any reputable publication, the rights revert to the author after some reasonable amount of time. Then they can sell option rights or expand etc however they see fit. (If a pub asks for rights in perpetuity be VERY wary!) Optioning for TV or film is usually the most lucrative, but can be very difficult, especially for new writers breaking into the field. This is especially true for short stories. One big exception is Arrival, which was based on Ted Chiang’s short story, which have paved the way for other short stories to get optioned in similar fashion.

georgeoliver 4y ago

I'm curious about the stats for SF readers/writers/publishers. As the parent post relates, compared to the past there are a lot less publishers and it would be extremely difficult to be a professional SF short story writer as your sole occupation. Has the pool of writers grown or stayed the same? What about readers?

avk 4y ago

Congrats to superamit! Well done with your persistence and I hope Uncanny is receptive to your future submissions. I'm excited to read the story. Disclaimer: light self-promo. Are others interested in more publishing posts like these? I've documented the journey to publication stories with stats, rejections, and a sense of the work involved for most of the short fiction I've published in literary journals. It's been cathartic and encouraging to share the entire process. My most notable piece[1] ended up making it into The Best American Mystery Stories[2] a few years ago. [1]: https://arsenalofwords.com/2018/10/30/how-loathing-travel-public-transit-a-tuscan-residency-24-rejections-and-a-writing-conference-led-to-my-first-published-short-story/ https://arsenalofwords.com/2018/10/30/how-loathing-travel-pu... [2]: https://arsenalofwords.com/2019/10/01/how-a-regional-writing-conference-led-to-publication-in-the-best-american-mystery-stories-2019/ https://arsenalofwords.com/2019/10/01/how-a-regional-writing...