Making Progress

I’ve been making good progress lately on Gunslinger to the Stars. My original deadline for the rough draft was today, but I think it will take no more than two additional weeks to finish it. There’s about four chapters left, and I’m so eager to write the last one that the others will almost certainly fly by.

I’ve also got a short story that should be going up soon. Some of you may remember the cover art I previewed a while ago for “The Gettysburg Paradox.” I’m gettting ready to publish that one, and it should be up over the holiday weekend.

Today is the anniversary of the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg. Some people celebrate the 4th of July by watching Independence Day; I celebrate it by watching Gettysburg. The American Civil War was a true watershed moment for this country and did more to make us who we are than any other war, including the Revolutionary War. Also, it was fought on July 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. As Martin Sheen said in the movie (acting in the role of Robert E. Lee), “God has a sense of humor.”

I’ll leave you with what is probably the best scene from the entire movie: the charge of the 20th Maine on Little Round Top. Incidentally, this is also the opening scene of “The Gettysburg Paradox.”

Take care!

General update and new short story goals

I may not have blogged much in the past couple of weeks, but I have been busy.

First of all, I’ve renewed work on The Sword Keeper, and this time I’m going to finish the damn thing. Too much time has passed already, and the story is too good to let it languish on my hard drive(s) any longer. As of now, the goal is to finish the 1.0 draft by the end of April. I haven’t put up a progress bar yet, but I will in the next few days.

Second, I’ve been busy writing some new short stories. On Monday, I finished “Lizzie-99XT,” a hard military SF piece about a starfighter pilot whose intelligence merges with the AI of her starfighter, giving her a very different perspective on space, time, and the heavens. And yesterday, I finished “Time and Space in Amish Country,” an Amish Sci-Fi Time Travel Romance that’s been sitting unfinished on my hard drive for a long, long time.

I’ve been thinking a lot ever since writing that post about making a living as a short story writer. While long-form fiction is still my bread and butter, I would like to work on my short form and make that an important part of what I do. Towards that end, I’ve set some new goals.

My biggest goal at this point is to write a new short story every week, on top of my other writing. If I can keep that up for a year, that’s 50 short stories that I didn’t have the year before. Even if most of them aren’t any good, the exercise will help to make me a better writer.

Writing short stories takes a slightly different skill set than writing novels and novellas, but there’s enough of an overlap that the two can feed into each other. In my experience, it’s a little bit like the difference between driving a car and riding a motorcycle. In some ways, they’re very different, but fundamentally they’re both driving. In a similar way, writing short stories and novels is still just storytelling.

My other goal is to read at least one short story every day. I didn’t realize this until recently, but almost every major SF magazine publishes all of their stories in full online (except for the two oldest ‘zines, Analog and Asimov’s—go figure). It takes only half an hour at most to read a short story, and because there are so many available online for free, I can read them on my phone from just about anywhere.

So that’s the plan. I’ll probably review a couple of short stories from time to time, as I find the really good ones. Should be something interesting to blog about, which is something else I need to be better about. Expect to see more posts in the near future.

New story, new release!

I have a story out in the latest issue of Perihelion! To read “L’enfer, c’est la Solitude,” click here. It’s free to read!

Those of you following the blog for a while will recognize this as a story I wrote almost exactly two years ago. Here’s what I said about it back then:

I can’t stand people who humbrag, so I’m just going to come out and say that this story is awesome. Seriously. Kickass freaking awesome. It may be the best short story I’ve written to date.

I’d like to think that I’ve written much better stories since then, but after re-reading it, it’s still pretty good. So go check it out!

So two years later, what do I think is the most kickass freaking awesome thing I’ve ever written? The fifth Sons of the Starfarers book, of course, which I just recently put up for pre-order!

Captives in Obscurity (Sons of the Starfarers: Book V) is now available for pre-order all across the internets! This the fifth of a nine-book series, and I think it’s pretty kickass freaking awesome. I’m biased, though, so you’ll have to wait until May 15th to read it and make up your own mind.

For those of you following the Sons of the Starfarers series, I’m hoping to get the next book out eight months from now, in November. I am definitely committed to finishing this series, though I have a few other awesome projects that are taking my time as well. The goal at this point is to space out the next four books six months from each other.

But if you’ve been anxiously awaiting Captives in Obscurity, you can pre-order your copy now!

Captives in Obscurity

There is no escape beyond Star's End.

Isaac and Reva are running out of time. Gulchina's cruelty knows no bounds, and on the edge of known space, no one can stop her. But an unexplored planet holds an ancient alien secret that may prove to be a game changer.

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About the Book

There is no escape beyond Star’s End.

The deadliest pirates in the galaxy have stolen the technology that will transform it. Now, on the edge of known space, they are poised to start an empire of their own.

Isaac and Reva are running out of time. Neither of them knows the extent of Gulchina’s plans, or whether the madwoman will keep them both alive after she achieves them.

But an unexplored planet beyond the Far Outworlds holds an ancient alien secret that not even Gulchina has uncovered. That secret will tip the balance in

SONS OF THE STARFARERS
BOOK V: CAPTIVES IN OBSCURITY

Details

Author: Joe Vasicek
Series: Sons of the Starfarers, Book 5
Genres: Science Fiction, Space Opera
Tag: 2016 Release
Publication Year: May 2016
Length: short novel
List Price: $9.99
eBook Price: $2.99

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$1 off the ebook with coupon code: BUY DIRECT

FREE ebook when you buy the audiobook direct!

Joe Vasicek

Joe Vasicek fell in love with science fiction and fantasy when he read The Neverending Story as a child. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Genesis Earth, Gunslinger to the Stars, The Sword Keeper, and the Sons of the Starfarers series. As a young man, he studied Arabic at Brigham Young University and traveled across the Middle East and the Caucasus Mountains. He lives in Utah with his wife and two apple trees.

Other Books in the "Sons of the Starfarers"

An Empire in Disarray

Victors in Liberty

The Complete Sons of the Starfarers

Some of the links in the page above are "affiliate links." This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. You will not receive any additional charge. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Can you make a living writing short fiction?

This question has been on my mind for the last couple of weeks, ever since I made a couple of semi-pro story sales. From all of the classes and conventions I’ve attended, the answer has been no, but I’m starting to wonder if that hasn’t changed in the last few years.

First of all, it’s worth pointing out that short stories are not like longer books. In my experience (and I am not a master of the short form by any stretch), short stories do not sell as well in ebook form as longer books. That’s been corroborated anecdotally by virtually every indie writer I’ve spoken with.

At the same time, they aren’t like longer form books in the traditional sense either. I have three deal breakers when it comes to traditional publishing: no non-compete clauses, no ambiguous rights reversion, and no payments based on net. Short story markets typically only buy first publication rights with a 6-12 month exclusivity period, and pay by the word. That means that there’s no reason (unless you want to self-publish immediately) not to sell your short stories to a traditional market first.

(For the sake of argument, I’m going to assume that you’re not writing erotica. It’s a completely different market with its own idiosyncracies, which I’m going to ignore just because I don’t write it. But numerous indies have already proven that it is definitely possible to make a living writing short-form erotica.)

So let’s do a little back-of-the-envelope to see what a professional short-story writer can make.

According to SFWA, a short story is any piece of writing less than 7,500 words long. For the sake of argument, let’s say you average about 4,000 words per short story.

If you write one short story per month, you’ll have 12 by the end of the year. If you write two per month, you’ll have about 25. That comes to about 300 words per day.

If you buckle down and write one short story a week (only 600 words per day), you’ll have about 50 short stories by the end of the year. Raise that to two short stories per week, and that’s 100 short stories per year.

For the sake of argument, let’s say you’ve written 100 short stories. The next step is to put them on submission, using a database like The Submission Grinder to help you find markets. Here are the basic rules you’ll follow:

Start at the top-paying markets and work your way down.
Don’t submit to a market that pays less than $50 for your story.
Don’t submit to markets that purchase full copyright (in other words, markets that won’t allow you to self-publish it after they buy it).

The professional markets pay upwards of $.06 per word. For a 4,000 word short story, that comes to $250 per sale. If we apply the Pareto principle to short story sales, only about 20% of our 100 stories will sell at this level (which is pathetically low for a professional short story writer, but let’s err on the conservative side). That comes to $5,000.

For the other 80 stories, let’s say you only manage to sell half of them at the minimum $50 rate—pathetic, I know, but we’re trying to be conservative. Forty stories at $50 each comes to $2,000. Together with the professional sales, that comes to a total of $7,000.

For reprint rights, let’s just apply the Pareto principle again to say that reprints account for about 20% of your income from traditional story sales, and original sales account for 80%. $7,000 divided by .8 is $8,750, which we’ll round down to $8,500 just to make the math easier.

So before you do any kind of self-publishing, you’ve got a positive balance of $8,500 just from writing and submitting those 100 stories. It’s not a lot, but it’s not insignificant either.

Now let’s say it takes about three years for you to make that $8,500, since it takes about two or three years to submit a story to all of the pro and semi-pro markets. That’s about $750 per quarter, or two professional sales, two or three semi-pro sales, and two or three reprint sales.

If I were going to self-publish short stories in order to make a living off of them, I would bundle and price them like this:

Singles for $.99 (ebook only).
Bundles of 3 for $2.99 (ebook only).
Collections of 10–12 for $6.99–$7.99, with paperback editions.

For the sake of argument, let’s ignore the $.99 singles. They only bring in 35¢ per sale, and you’re probably not going to release all of your short stories as singles. They can be useful for promotions, especially if you make them free from time to time, but they aren’t going to be moneymakers.

If you put all 100 stories into the $2.99 bundles, that comes to 33 (which we’ll round up to 35, just to make the math easier). The royalty rate on each of those sales is 70%, or $2. If you average only 8 sales each month of the $2.99 bundles, that comes to $560.

Looking at it another way, let’s apply the Pareto principle to say that 20% of those 35 bundles are selling a book a day. That’s 7 bundles making about $60 a month, or $420, and the rest are making $105, bringing the total each month to $525.

So for argument’s sake, let’s round down and say that you’re making $500 a month on your $2.99 bundles.

For the larger collections, let’s say you average only about 5 sales each per month, earning about $5 per sale. That’s $50 per collection, or $500 for 10 collections. Paperback sales may add to that, but let’s be conservative and just roll print sales into that number.

If it seems unusual to sell that much with self-published short stories, remember that each story published in a magazine serves as a de-facto advertisement for your self-published stories. With each new magazine publication, your name is put in front of hundreds or even thousands of short story readers, a portion of whom will search for you online and find your other work. Combine that with periodic free promotions on your singles, and it shouldn’t be too hard to build an audience.

So a typical month at these numbers would look something like this:

A pro-sale or a couple of semi-pro / reprints ($250)
About 250 sales of the $2.99 bundles ($500)
About 100 sales of the print/ebook collections ($500)

This is after only a year’s worth of work, writing 2 short stories per week or about 1.2k words per day. It might take a few years to get to this point, since it takes a few years to submit a short story to all of the markets, but if you can keep up this pace then by the time you’ve got 100 self-published short stories, this is probably what your career is going to look like.

And this is using conservative numbers. If you manage to sell half of those 100 stories to professional markets, the numbers go way up. Same if you have a couple of bundles that sell more than 1 copy per day. Same if you build a respectable email list that can push a couple hundred sales with each new release.

So is it possible to make a living writing short fiction? Well, let’s flip that question around and ask: is it possible to make a living writing short non-fiction? Of course it is—it’s called freelance writing. If anything, writing fiction gives us an advantage, because with fiction, the author is the brand.

These numbers look meager ($1,250 a month isn’t a great living), but remember, it’s only after 100 stories, or a year’s worth of work, writing at 1.2k words per day. If you can keep that up for several years, your income will scale up accordingly—especially on the self-publishing side.

Before the digital disruption of publishing, short fiction was dying a long, slow death. There weren’t a lot of paying markets for it, and self-publishing wasn’t a viable option. Now, there appears to be a renaissance of the short form. New pro and semi-pro markets are popping up all the time, ebooks and print on demand are opening up all sorts of new opportunities, and reader engagement has never been higher. That’s true of short fiction just as it’s true of the longer forms.

Is it easy to make a living writing short fiction? Hell no! It requires a tremendous amount of self-discipline, personal organization, and dedication. Even though 1.2k words/day isn’t a whole lot, headspace does become an issue with multiple stories. Above all else, you need to have an iron-thick skin when it comes to rejection. I’ve accrued over 150 rejections and only 4 semi-pro story sales over the course of my career.

But if you’re a prolific, hard-working writer with an efficient system for submitting, self-publishing, and marketing, then in theory at least it appears to be possible to make a living writing non-erotica short fiction.

Recalibrating

One of the things about being a creative person is that it’s very hard to keep an organized daily routine for very long. Usually you’ll have one that works out well for a couple of weeks before something happens to make it fall apart completely, and then you have to recalibrate and start over. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it is something you have to adjust for.

I’m in one of those recalibrating phases right now, as you can probably tell by the fact that my unfinished WIP is past the self-imposed deadline and I haven’t posted in this blog in over a week. Don’t worry, though—things are going well, and I’ll soon be back up to speed.

Interestingly enough, it wasn’t LTUE that blew up my writing routine. I actually managed to write every day while I was there. It was a bunch of stuff that happened afterward, most notably taxes and car issues. The taxes are completely squared away, but the car issues are ongoing, so I dropped the writing to take a temp job all last week.

Gunslinger to the Stars is still unfinished but at a good stopping point. What I’m probably going to do is put it on the back burner for a month or two as I work on other projects.

Top on that list is to get Captives in Obscurity (Sons of the Starfarers: Book V) ready for publication. The copy edits are back and I have the cover now, so it should be up for pre-order before the end of the week.

Also, there’s another J.M. Wight short story I’m getting ready to put out. Just need to get some feedback and write the author’s note. Though what I may do is bundle that with another J.M. Wight story that I haven’t written yet, so that I can justify putting it out at the $2.99 price point. And the author’s note for this one is going to be a bit unusual too: an essay that tells my own personal story of how I got into family history and some of the spiritual things I’ve experienced from it.

So it may be another month or two before that J.M. Wight bundle comes out. But one thing that definitely is coming out is my short story “L’enfer, C’est la Solitude.” It will be appearing online at Perihelion for their March issue, where you can read it for free. More links as that becomes available.

I’ve also got some short story ideas that I want to flesh out. I’ll probably take the next week or two to work on those, but you won’t see them for a while since they’ll be on submission. But I do have a lot of blog posts that I want to write as well, including:

#RIPTwitter and the ongoing controversy there.
Thoughts on making a living with short fiction.
The guest lecture I gave to Sanderson’s English 318 class.
Cover reveal for Captives in Obscurity.
Some book reviews.

As for the personal issues that blew up my writing routine in the first place, don’t worry—everything’s fine. Right now, my plan is to buy a scooter and sell my car, just because a scooter would fit my needs better (and would be a lot of fun to ride!). It would also help me to save up for another vehicle next winter, possibly a truck. I’m not too keen on taking out an auto loan, but with taxes out of the way my personal finances are actually in a pretty good place—much better than I expected them to be. So things are looking up.

In any case, that’s what’s going on with me. I haven’t dropped off the face of the Earth yet, just recalibrating and making some adjustments. Expect to see some more stories very soon!

I sold two short stories!

Fantastic news! I sold not one but two short stories this week!

“L’enfer, c’est la solitude” will appear in Perihelion in March or April. And sometime over the summer (probably in June), “The Curse of the Lifewalker” will appear in Sci Phi Journal.

Two semi-pro sales in one week is pretty fantastic, especially after garnering more than 175 rejections over the past two years. I’ve got a bunch more on submission, including several that I haven’t blogged about. I’m averaging about one short story per month, and new markets are popping up all the time, so I don’t expect this to be the last story sale announcement this year. May it be the first of many!

In other news, LTUE 2016 was fantastic. I’m debating whether to write a full blog post about that, because I didn’t take any pictures or tweet anything pithy about it. Still, I came out with a lot of takeaways, especially in terms of writing. The panels I participated on were a lot of fun too, geeking out about stuff like slower-than-light space travel and post-scarcity leisure societies. And it was also really great to see all of my old writing friends here in Utah.

Now I really want to do one of two things: attend another sci-fi convention, and write and submit more short stories!

Still alive (though it may not seem like it)

Sorry for not posting to the blog in a while. I seem to be chronically disorganized, and updating the blog is unfortunately rather low on the priority list. But I’m still alive, and still writing.

Gunslinger to the Stars is coming along well, though it’s not been without its hiccups. I’m about halfway through right now, and while I’m probably not going to hit the original deadline, I should have no problem finishing the rough draft by the end of February.

I’m also happy to report that I’ve got the edits back for Captives in Obscurity (Sons of the Starfarers: Book V) and am working with the cover designer to get that part squared away soon. Once I have the cover, it’s a simple matter of writing up the metadata and formatting the ebook. So you can expect to see that go up for pre-order sometime in February.

Also in February, it looks like I’ll have a short story come out, possibly two! “The Gettysburg Paradox” is coming off of submission soon, and I recently wrote a J.M. Wight short titled “A Covenant of Hearts.” No idea where to submit that one, so I’ll probably just publish it myself. The J.M. Wight short needs a bit more work, but “The Gettysburg Paradox” is ready to go up almost right away. All I need to do is figure out a cover.

So even though things have been quiet, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes over here. Expect to see some more cool stuff really soon!

To publish or submit?

Man, I am so sick right now. Caught a stomach flu from my neice, and it has been going through me like a chainsaw through butter.

In any case, things are going fairly well aside from that. Heart of the Nebula is now up for pre-order through November 21st, so you can expect to hear a lot more about that in the coming weeks. Captives in Obscurity (Sons of the Starfarers: Book V) is nearly ready to send off to my test readers, and should be published sometime in January or February. Besides that, I’m working on a couple of other big projects that should come out next year.

Right now, though, I have something of a dilemma. Do you guys remember Starship Lachoneus? It’s that completely unmarketable story idea I had a while back: the one where Jesus Christ organizes the construction of a generation ship to take humanity to the stars, because after His millenial reign, the Earth will be rendered uninhabitable. Well, I wrote the prologue, and it actually stands well enough on its own to be a short story. The dilemma is whether I should publish it now, or submit it to a short story market.

From what I can tell, the market for Mormon sci-fi short fiction is somewhere between small to non-existent. Irreantum closed a few years ago, Sunstone is limited to an annual contest, and Dialogue only pays in contributor copies. The Mormon Lit Blitz would be awesome, except that the story is more than 2k words long. Another option would be an anthology like Monsters and Mormons, but I’m not aware of any new ones.

I could try to submit it to the mainstream sci-fi markets, but I don’t think it would be a good fit for any of them. It’s written for a Mormon audience, with cultural and religious references that only people familiar with Mormonism would get. That said, the religious elements aren’t all that different from any other sci-fi world-building element, and the story isn’t overtly preachy or moral, so I suppose you don’t have to be a believing Mormon to enjoy it.

What do you guys think? Should I submit it elsewhere first, or publish it myself?

A short rant about simultaneous submissions

TL;DR: If you run a short story magazine and it takes you longer than six weeks to respond to submissions, you should allow simultaneous submissions as a courtesy to your writers.

A simultaneous submission is when the writer sends the same story to multiple markets at the same time, instead of going down the list one-by-one and waiting for a rejection before submitting it to the next market. Multiple submissions are when the writer sends multiple stories to the same market at the same time. Generally, most sci-fi magazines do not accept simultaneous or multiple submissions.

I can understand why you don’t want to open the door to multiple submissions. A lot of us are fairly prolific, and if you allow us, we can swamp you with manuscripts in very short order. But simultaneous submissions are completely different.

Of course it’s frustrating to find a great story, only to learn that the writer has sold it somewhere else. But you know what’s even more frustrating? To watch your stories languish in slushpiles for months and even years while you know that you have readers who would eagerly snap them up the moment you publish them yourself. When you don’t allow simultaneous submissions, you are effectively demanding exclusivity for the length of the submission period, and exclusivity hurts readers and writers alike.

See, the publishing world has changed. The magazines aren’t the only available option for publishing our stories anymore. It is entirely possible for us to publish those stories ourselves, and to do quite well by them. In fact, if we have a story that’s ready to go, we’re putting off the money that we could be making if we decide to submit to the magazines instead.

The current status-quo regarding simultaneous and multiple submissions was made back when publishers held all the power, and writers could not realistically be their own publishers. It’s a holdout from the era of the gatekeepers, before the golden age of self-publishing. But that era is over, and we’re no longer as dependent on you as we used to be.

Which is not to say that the magazines have no value. On the contrary, you provide a great deal of value, and we want to support you with our content. That’s why we’re still submitting our stories to you instead of publishing themselves. When you publish our stories, it allows us to reach new readers and boosts our reputation in the field. We’re all in this together, and we want to support you just like you want to support us.

But look, can we meet in the middle here? When our stories are locked up in your slushpile for five months at a time, it makes us think twice. If you’re going to take your time, let us send our stories elsewhere while we wait to hear back from you.

I’m not going to lie: when it takes you three or more months to respond to our submissions, demanding exclusivity all the while, the word that comes to mind is “unprofessional.” I don’t care if your magazine has been in print for longer than I’ve been alive, or that you published such-and-such big name author before he was famous. It’s 2015 now, and that’s what it looks like.

I understand that you might not have the resources to respond to every submission in a timely way. That’s totally understandable. But if that is the case, there is no good reason why you can’t allow simultaneous submissions as a professional courtesy.

There are a lot of magazines that I would love to be published in. Many of these are semi-pro and token paying magazines that still want to support, in spite of the fact that they don’t pay very well. But even the pro-paying magazines make me think twice when my stories are locked up with them for months at a time. If your goal is to keep your slushpile manageable by getting me to self-reject, the best I can say is that it’s working.

If you run a short story magazine and you aren’t able to give us a timely response to our submissions, then please, do your writers a favor and allow us the courtesy of simultaneous submissions.

Two new stories!

Now that I’m back from Cape Cod, I’ve got two major projects that I’m focused on: finish the first draft of Captives in Obscurity (Sons of the Starfarers: Book V), and get Heart of the Nebula ready for publication in November. Those are some big releases, so you can expect to hear a lot in the coming months about them—especially Heart of the Nebula, which I’ve been working on for the past four years. Lots of exciting stuff!

In the meantime, I had two smaller releases in the past couple of weeks, and I think you guys are really going to enjoy them!

The first is the re-release of “A Hill on Which to Die,” an epic fantasy novelette about a band of free orcs trekking into the wilderness to start a new clan. This is my first real foray into fantasy, but I really enjoyed it and am thinking seriously about writing more books in this universe. If that sounds like something you’d like to see, then give this story a try and let me know what you think by posting a review or shooting me an email.

The second is a short story in the Star Wanderers universe. Longtime readers may recognize it as a story I wrote last year as part of the Short Blitz challenge. “Starchild” is a quick read that takes place in a far-off corner of the universe, and shows what life is like on a tiny isolated space colony in the Far Outworlds.

This is only the tip of the iceberg as far as stories go. My goal is to have a new release at least every two months, with short stories in between the major novel releases. I’ve been averaging about one short story every month as far as writing goes, and it looks like quite a few of them are going to come off of the submission pipeline (either by getting picked up or by exhausting the pro/semi-pro markets) in the next year or so. This is all in addition to my novel writing, which hasn’t slowed down in any way from writing short stories.

So you can definitely expect to see more stories from me in the coming months! And as always, if you want to be the first to hear about a new release (as well as special offers and exclusives), then be sure to sign up for my email list.

Thanks for reading!

Category: Short Stories