{"id":10421,"date":"2016-02-29T11:32:51","date_gmt":"2016-02-29T18:32:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=10421"},"modified":"2016-03-02T00:19:42","modified_gmt":"2016-03-02T07:19:42","slug":"can-you-make-a-living-writing-short-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/can-you-make-a-living-writing-short-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Can you make a living writing short fiction?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This question has been on my mind for the last couple of weeks, ever since\u00a0I made a\u00a0couple of semi-pro story sales<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

At the same time, they aren’t like longer form books in the traditional sense either. I have three deal breakers<\/a> when it comes to traditional publishing: no non-compete clauses,\u00a0no ambiguous rights reversion, and no payments based on net. Short story markets typically only\u00a0buy first publication rights with a 6-12 month exclusivity period, and pay by the word. That means that there’s\u00a0no reason (unless you want to self-publish immediately) not to sell your short stories to a traditional market first.<\/p>\n

(For the sake of argument, I’m going to\u00a0assume 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.)<\/p>\n

So let’s do a little back-of-the-envelope to see what a professional short-story writer can make.<\/p>\n

According to SFWA<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0Raise that to two short stories per week, and that’s 100 short stories per year.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> to help you find markets. Here are the basic rules you’ll follow:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Start at the top-paying markets and work your way down.<\/li>\n
  2. Don’t submit to a market that pays less than $50 for your story.<\/li>\n
  3. 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).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    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\u00a0the Pareto principle<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

    For the other 80 stories, let’s say you only manage to sell half of them at the minimum $50 rate\u2014pathetic, I know, but we’re trying to be conservative.\u00a0Forty stories at $50 each comes to $2,000. Together with the professional sales, that comes to a total of $7,000.<\/p>\n

    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\u00a0we’ll round down to $8,500\u00a0just to make the math easier.<\/p>\n

    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.<\/p>\n

    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.<\/p>\n

    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:<\/p>\n