5 ms·

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

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*
  - ghaff 4y ago
    "For the exposure" is a dangerous path. That said, there are a ton of ways in which writing, especially non-fiction, can be a loss leader for consulting, a day job, etc. I suppose it sucks a bit for others trying to make that writing their day job but I'm hardly going to campaign for gatekeeping all public authorship to protect those in the club.
- ivraatiems 4y ago
  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.
  - f17 4y ago
    > I made a deal with myself that I'd charge something for it. That's smart. It's probably different for short stories, but with novels, "free exposure" is usually problematic unless it's done right. (I'm launching a novel in '23.) In principle, the ideal price at launch is $0, insofar as you never want price to be an issue for any reader, and you hope to set off an exponential word-of-mouth phenomenon that renders the first few days or weeks of sales irrelevant by comparison. The problem is that, empirically, you don't get the same quality of readers (as measured by likeliness to read, likeliness to finish, likeliness to review, likeliness to write a fair review, and likeliness to write a useful review) with free giveaways as you do when people buy it. The S-Tier strat might be to give the book away for free while somehow finding a way to command the psychological investment that people would have in a book if they had paid $30 for it.
    - ivraatiems 4y ago
      > The S-Tier strat might be to give the book away for free while somehow finding a way to command the psychological investment that people would have in a book if they had paid $30 for it. There are authors who have had success with releasing on blogs chapter-a-month style or similar. In my opinion, if the work is good enough to catch people, it'll get engagement even if it's free, if you find an audience. Lots of authors these days also do Kickstarters and other novel fundraising techniques where they fund future work on the back of long-standing, free or nearly free work.
keyle 4y ago
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!
- munificent 4y ago
  > 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.
  - corrral 4y ago
    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, all that kind of thing.
    - majormajor 4y ago
      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.
hamiltonians 4y ago
you mean thousands of dollars?
f17 4y ago
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.
- corrral 4y ago
  > 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 several genres did back then. Possibly even better.
  - majormajor 4y ago
    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.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
    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.
- shubb 4y ago
  I read a lot on online fiction platforms - AO3 and Wattpad are popular platforms but I mostly read Royal Road which seeks to copy asian web novel platforms. Most of the writers are amateurs but they have diverse means of getting paid - some platforms like Wattpad and Webnovel help writers paywall later chapters, some writers do manually with a paid blog. Some ask for donations on kofi or patreon. The thing is, speaking about someone who is putting in the effort and skill you'd need to publish for $100 in an anthology magazine - I wonder how much a writer like that makes on these platforms. $100 is only 25 five dollar doners. Maybe "1000 fans" is more profitable. Here is a top writer from Royal Road - you can see they are pulling $1000 a month. This is surely unusual but it isn't bad https://www.patreon.com/MonroeByJahx https://www.patreon.com/MonroeByJahx
leephillips 4y ago
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 freelance world.
- ghaff 4y ago
  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.
  - leephillips 4y ago
    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.
    - ghaff 4y ago
_glass 4y ago
That's nothing, I write for academia, and pay for getting published.
hackernewds 4y ago
As an outsider, these seem like terrible compensation for time esp given the talent it seems necessary to publish here.

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*
- ghaff 4y ago
  "For the exposure" is a dangerous path. That said, there are a ton of ways in which writing, especially non-fiction, can be a loss leader for consulting, a day job, etc. I suppose it sucks a bit for others trying to make that writing their day job but I'm hardly going to campaign for gatekeeping all public authorship to protect those in the club.
ivraatiems 4y ago
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.
- f17 4y ago
  > I made a deal with myself that I'd charge something for it. That's smart. It's probably different for short stories, but with novels, "free exposure" is usually problematic unless it's done right. (I'm launching a novel in '23.) In principle, the ideal price at launch is $0, insofar as you never want price to be an issue for any reader, and you hope to set off an exponential word-of-mouth phenomenon that renders the first few days or weeks of sales irrelevant by comparison. The problem is that, empirically, you don't get the same quality of readers (as measured by likeliness to read, likeliness to finish, likeliness to review, likeliness to write a fair review, and likeliness to write a useful review) with free giveaways as you do when people buy it. The S-Tier strat might be to give the book away for free while somehow finding a way to command the psychological investment that people would have in a book if they had paid $30 for it.
  - ivraatiems 4y ago
    > The S-Tier strat might be to give the book away for free while somehow finding a way to command the psychological investment that people would have in a book if they had paid $30 for it. There are authors who have had success with releasing on blogs chapter-a-month style or similar. In my opinion, if the work is good enough to catch people, it'll get engagement even if it's free, if you find an audience. Lots of authors these days also do Kickstarters and other novel fundraising techniques where they fund future work on the back of long-standing, free or nearly free work.

keyle 4y ago

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!

munificent 4y ago
> 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.
- corrral 4y ago
  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, all that kind of thing.
  - majormajor 4y ago
    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.

hamiltonians 4y ago

you mean thousands of dollars?

f17 4y ago

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.

corrral 4y ago
> 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 several genres did back then. Possibly even better.
- majormajor 4y ago
  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.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
  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.
shubb 4y ago
I read a lot on online fiction platforms - AO3 and Wattpad are popular platforms but I mostly read Royal Road which seeks to copy asian web novel platforms. Most of the writers are amateurs but they have diverse means of getting paid - some platforms like Wattpad and Webnovel help writers paywall later chapters, some writers do manually with a paid blog. Some ask for donations on kofi or patreon. The thing is, speaking about someone who is putting in the effort and skill you'd need to publish for $100 in an anthology magazine - I wonder how much a writer like that makes on these platforms. $100 is only 25 five dollar doners. Maybe "1000 fans" is more profitable. Here is a top writer from Royal Road - you can see they are pulling $1000 a month. This is surely unusual but it isn't bad https://www.patreon.com/MonroeByJahx https://www.patreon.com/MonroeByJahx

leephillips 4y ago

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 freelance world.

ghaff 4y ago
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.
- leephillips 4y ago
  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.
  - ghaff 4y ago

_glass 4y ago

That's nothing, I write for academia, and pay for getting published.

hackernewds 4y ago

As an outsider, these seem like terrible compensation for time esp given the talent it seems necessary to publish here.