Can you make a living writing short stories?

ByJohn Brown

We already know that many people break into the novel market WITHOUT writing short stories. So they’re not necessary for starting a writing career, although they might have helped some folks. See this page http://johndbrown.com/writers/writing-business-facts-figures/ for links that will show you how people break in. But some people just love short stories, so the question is can you make a living writing them?

The answer is yes, you CAN do it–you go into television and get hired to write scripts for TV series (grin).

But what about doing it in print? Well, let’s try some conservative math.

1) How much would you need to sell?

TARGET: a conservative $30,000 gross per year.

The median household income in the USA is $50,000. But you can find a place (rural Ohio or Indiana or North Dakota etc.) where housing is relatively cheap and live on $30k. I think this is a reasonable target. So let’s make some assumptions about the stories. We’ll assume each short averages around 4,000 words and that you get paid seven cents per word. To earn your target amount you’d have to sell:

  • TOTAL WORDS YOU NEED TO SELL: 428,571
  • TOTAL STORIES YOU NEED TO SELL: 107 (words divided by average story length)
  • TOTAL STORIES/WEEK: 2 sales per week (weeks in year divided by number of stories)

At 10 cents a word:

  • TOTAL WORDS YOU NEED TO SELL: 300,000
  • TOTAL STORIES YOU NEED TO SELL: 75
  • TOTAL STORIES/WEEK: 1.4 sales per week

No, this doesn’t count reprints, movie deals, gaming contracts, etc. But reprints usually don’t pay well and movie deals, while they pay well, can’t be counted on. Besides, we’re being conservative. 

2) Is this a feasible production rate?

Again, a little math.

TARGET: 2 stories, 8,000 words average per week

If we assume you write five days per week for six hours per day at a rate of 500 words per hour, which may be very aggressive if you try to include thinking and revising time in that, then you’ll produce 15,000 words per week.

So, yes, this is a feasible, if aggressive, production rate–on paper. But I don’t know anyone finishing this many stories per week. Furthermore, it’s highly unlikely you will sell 100% of what you send out. So you need to actually produce MORE than two stories per week. You might have to end up writing three or four. Week after week after week. That’s one story every day or two.

Theoretically, yes, that rate of production still fits in the 15,000 word capacity. But I’m going to say it’s doubtful anyone can do this because I haven’t seen anyone do it. Have you? 

But even if you were the Lizard King of writing and could pull this off every week of the year, the question is can you sell all those stories?

3) Is it feasible to sell two stories per week?

According to http://duotrope.com/index.aspx there are about 200 venues for short fiction paying pro rates, which for them is 5 cents or more. No,  anthologies are not represented there. But I’m not sure it will change the equations that much. So you have to sell 107 stories to these 200 markets. I don’t know how many slots are open in these places. Some of these venues publish one story per year, some publish twelve, some more. Some are published semi-annually, quarterly, bi-monthly. Let’s say there are 2,000 slots. Of course, we might need to count total wordage up for hire at these venues instead, but we’re just doing this on the back of a napkin. So 107 stories out of 2,000 slots means you’d have to make up 5% of the market. You sell five of every 100 stories these folks buy.

FIVE PERCENT OF THE WHOLE MARKET!

Nobody makes up 5% of the whole short fiction market. NOBODY. Okay, let’s say there are 4,000 slots. Each venue averaging twenty stories per year. So you have to make up 2.5% of the market. Nobody does that either. What about 1%? Anyone? One out of every 100 stories? No.

Is this because writers are lazy? Could it be done? You might be the first?

That’s lotto thinking. What you want is demonstrated income, i.e. people have DEMONSTRATED it can be done. Nobody has demonstrated this can be done in the current market. So it’s not reasonable to expect you’ll do something nobody else is doing.

So the answer is that even if you produce three to four short stories per week, you’ll never be able to sell enough to make a living. Now, I know of a few authors who can make a few thousand dollars per year writing short stories. I’ve heard of one guy who made $10,000 a year for a few years. But can you live on that? Even if you move to a place where housing is very, very cheap? Besides, we’re trying to avoid lotto thinking here. We’re trying to be practical and conservative. This is one guy. Do you yourself know anyone who has done this? I wouldn’t want to base my future on what one guy did.

CONCLUSION: there’s no evidence that strongly suggests it’s feasible to sell at the necessary rate to make $10,000 per year let alone $30,000.

4) Re-purpose the wordage to Novels!

Go back up and look at the annual output of words. If you can write 300,000 to 450,000 words per year, you could write four to six young adult novels (averaging 70,000 words per book) or two to three adult novels (averaging 120,000 words per) in that same time.

Why not build a career in novels?

Yes, you may start at $5,000 – $6,000 advance per book. But if you sell well, that goes up. Plus, if it does sell well, you get royalties. Plus you can sell foreign novel rights. Plus you get an advance to help with some expenses. More importantly, we have thousands and thousands of folks DEMONSTRATING they can make a living writing at that pace.

So write short stories if you love them, but don’t expect to make a living at it.

5) But what about Amazon and self-publishing?

Could you make a living selling your shorts out there?

Only if your shorts were once worn by Brittany Spears.

For more on e-book sales, let me recommend you read a few posts by J. A. Konrath. I’ll let you decide. But please note that he’s selling NOVELS. And as always, you want to be realistic about this and make sure you see many people DEMONSTRATING it can be done. Do you think Konrath presents such evidence? You tell me.

Postscript

Read these two posts by Dean Wesley Smith where he busts some big myths about not being able to make a living writing:

Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing: Only 300 Writers Make a Living

Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing: Can’t Make Money in Fiction

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  • Villainous Heroes

    ByJohn Brown

    If we root against villains based on moral judgments, then how is it possible to root for heroes who are not just bad boys but down right criminal, e.g. hitmen, mobsters, thieves?

    It’s a wonderful question that has a simple and revealing explanation.  We root for these bad guys because they’re really good.

    What?!

    When talking about bad heroes, what we often do is:

    1. Take them out of their context.
    2. Focus on one or two negative traits, not the person as a whole.
    3. Abstract them and miss what’s happening in real time as we process the story. We only have so much working memory and usually can only think about what’s being presented versus what we think about when we’re out of the story. What’s being presented in the story is mostly the threats to these heroes, not the consequences of their evil deeds. And if the consequences are show, it’s always modified by context (#1 and #2 above).
    4. Confuse fascination with rooting.

    When we actually look at what’s happening with the hero in the context of the story, what we find is that rooting is still based on moral judgments of who is good/right and who is not. We root for people we think are in the right (given their context) or are getting, undeservedly, the short end of the stick; we root against people who we think are in the wrong.

    Here are some examples.

    DISNEY’S ALADDIN

    Thief. This one’s easy, I grant it. But it’s illustrative. I never once didn’t root for the boy. But I also never saw him as a true bad boy. He was nice. He shared the bread he stole with kids less fortunate. The guards were mean brutes. Jaffar was wicked and threatened the sultan and Jasmine who were good and innocent. was in a situation that provided some leeway for his behavior (alone, penniless).

    1. Context. He’s fighting a much greater evil, someone we are rooting against.
    2. Whole Person. He is a thief, but he’s also kind. Given his whole person, he falls on the side of good.
    3. Processing. As we process the story we’re never shown awful consequnces of his theiving. Mostly just the good and courageous things he does. And the threats to his welfare.

    THE ITALIAN JOB

    Thieves.

    1. Context. The movie starts with a heist and then a betrayal and murders by a traitor. Yes they’re theives, but we wittness a greater evil. The people they fight against are worse than they are.
    2. Whole person. Except for the thieving, he’s a likeable guy.
    3. Processing. We see few negative consequences of their actions to others, but we are constantly being presented with threats to them by guys who are committing greater crimes.
    4. Fascination. I was incredibly interested in the scam–the plans, tech, everything.

    THE PROFESSIONAL

    Mob Hit Man

    1. Context. He’s protecting a girl from other hit men. He’s fighting a bigger evil. He’s also taken advantage of by his boss.
    2. Whole Person. He’s a hitman, but more time is spent on his kindness.
    3. Processing. We see very little of the effect his hits have on others. Instead we are presented with threats to the girl and him.

    DIRTY HARRY

    Murdering vigilante

    1. Context. He’s stopping guys who are doing terrible things.
    3. Processing. We don’t focus on negative consequences of his vigilantism, but the threats from these really bad guys.

    MATCHSTICK MEN

    Scammers of the elderly

    From IMDB “Roy’s private life, however, is not so successful. An obsessive-compulsive agoraphobe with no personal relationships to call his own, Roy is barely hanging on to his wits, and when his idiosyncrasies begin to threaten his criminal productivity he’s forced to seek the help of a psychoanalyst just to keep him in working order. While Roy is looking for a quick fix, his therapy begets more than he bargained for: the revelation that he has a teenage daughter–a child whose existence he suspected but never dared confirm. What’s more troubling, 14-year-old Angela wants to meet the father she never knew. At first, Angela’s appearance disrupts her neurotic father’s carefully ordered routine. Soon, however, with his own unique spin on parenthood, Roy begins to enjoy a relationship he never dreamed of having with his daughter.”

    1. Context. Much of the time is spent his on his loneliness and issues with his estranged daughter.
    2. Whole person. He steals, but we never see huge suffering from it. We see all the other issues he deals and have sympathy for him.
    3. Processing. We’re focused on the threats to him, not the consequences of his one negative trait.
    4. Fascination. I was fascinated by the scam and this pulled me along through the first.

    CONCLUSION

    What happened in all these stories as I experienced them was that the story carefully managed my view of the hero. He was always on the better side of the antagonists. He was always more good than bad, even if only by a little. And the story focused my attention most of the time on the bad/threats/consequences flowing from the antagonists, not the bad from the hero’s deeds.

    What this shows is that you could write a story about a villain and make him the hero. In some instances it might be exceedingly difficult. For example, I think Hitler would be a hard sell as a hero, someone we’d root for. But the Neo-Nazis prove it’s not too hard a sell for some people. 

    I don’t think recognizing the fact that we can make “bad” people sympathetic means authors are “simply being clever” or “pushing buttons.” After all, to write well you must believe and care about what you’re writing about. YOU have to believe it. Nor do I think it undercuts the notion that we root for people based on a moral stance. It just recognizes the fact that moral judgments, in fact, the vast majority of appraisals of situations, happen quickly with the facts at hand, which are the ones in our working memories. The ones the authors are controlling.

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    New Workshop: How to Write a Story that Rocks

    ByJohn Brown

    Folks, the first tentative schedule for Life, The Universe, & Everything (LTUE) has been set. For the past few years I’ve been teaching a 2-3 hour workshop called “The 3 Things You Must Learn To Write Killer Stories.” I think I must have taught it over 15 times in different venues. Hundreds have attended and said they loved it.

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    So what we’re going to do in this workshop is this.

    1. I’m going to bring in some ideas for character, setting, and problem. We’re not going to generate from scratch as we’ve done in the past because I want to get to the next steps.
    2. Then I’m going to teach you how to go from idea to outline–we’re going to do it together, and you’re going to learn exactly how to know what comes next 
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    5. At every step I’ll be pointing out key story development concepts and principles

    When we finish, you should be able to:

    1. Identify the essential story objectives and story development questions–get these right and the rest doesn’t really matter. This will include the HANDFUL of key things you need to worry about and develop with character and plot.
    2. Develop more likeable and interesting characters
    3. Develop more powerful story concepts (call it premise, problem, situation, whatever). Once you get this the story writes a lot of itself.
    4. Explain the real Story Cycle. Not Campbell’s mumbo-jumbo hero’s journey. Not the three, five, seven, nine acts. Not Freytag’s diagram. Story.
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    6. Use the Story Cycle concepts to generate a story bullet outline and take a bullet step idea and turn it into a scene.
    7. Explain the creative principles that help you generate stories more easily.

    Larry Correia will be there as well. So I’m expecting this to be a very helpful workshop. I’m going to do all I can to make it as good or better than the first.

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    What Separates the Gifted from the Schlubs and How Praise Can Backfire

    ByJohn Brown

    What makes someone gifted?

    Raw talent?

    Sure. An apptitutde for something always helps. But it appears it’s not enough. True expertise takes work. And those trying to help (i.e. parents, teachers, coaches) can hinder if they give the wrong kind of praise.

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    The Meadow Mount School of Music

    This music school in the Adirondacks has “trained such luminaries as Pinchas Zukerman, Itzhak Perlman, Joshua Bell, Lynn Harrell, and Yo-Yo Ma.” A number of researchers wanted to see what the difference was between the students who seemed most skilled and those who weren’t. They divided students “into three skill levels, including one the faculty had identified as having the best chance of becoming world-class soloists.” Then they looked at the differences.

    According to the report, “the results were clear-cut, with little room for any sort of inscrutable God-given talent. The elite musicians had simply practiced far more than the others…Psychologists found a second attribute in elite players that is less obvious than sheer hours of practice. While most of us think of practice as the repetition of tough spots (and this is how many young people do practice), elite musicians, they found, took a different approach.”  Read full article.

    The majority of childhood prodigies never fulfill their early promise

    Why? According to these researchers it’s because so many early-bloomers get warped by their experience and fail to develop perseverance. More here.

    Praise that Undermines Achievement

    It appears that how we praise achievement affects performance. Sometimes in large and startling ways.

    You may think that it’s good to praise your child for being “smart” or “good” in some subject. But there’s growing evidence that giving kids such labels doesn’t improve or motivate performance, but actually reduces it.

    Psychologist Carol Dweck and her team have studied the effect of praise on students in a variety of settings. “Repeating her experiments, Dweck found this effect of praise on performance held true for students of every socioeconomic class. It hit both boys and girls—the very brightest girls especially (they collapsed the most following failure). Even preschoolers weren’t immune to the inverse power of praise.” So what type of praise actually works? Read here.

    When does genius bloom?

    We often think genius must be tied to being precocity. After all, Motzart was doing musical flips when he was still a kid.  For writers, however, it appears this isn’t the case. More here.

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  • The Secret to Getting Great Story Ideas

    ByJohn Brown

    The Secret To Getting Great Story Ideas Passion GuyLast week I spent a lovely day with the League of Utah Writers at their annual writing conference. I presented “The Secret to Getting Great Story Ideas” which was about how to stop generating great story ideas by accident and start generating them on purpose, whenever you need them. I promised the folks I’d post my PowerPoint and notes. You’ll find them below.

    The Secret To Getting Great Story Ideas 2015 LUW – Presenter Notes

    The Secret To Getting Story Ideas 2015 LUW – Slides

    For those wanting more details, you’ll find the same idea in my series on getting ideas. Here’s the first post: “Can You Create a Redneck Crapper”.

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  • LDStorymakers Presentation

    ByJohn Brown

    I’m at LDStorymakers this weekend. Had a wonderful time yesterday facilitating idea generation for the magic systems of eight writers who all had some really cool stuff.  Today I will be giving my presentation on banishing writer’s doubt, fear, and block using cognitive therapy.

    For those who want the slides, here they are.

    Banish writers fear doubt and block with cognitive therapy (PDF)

    Enjoy!

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  • Why stories follow patterns

    ByJohn Brown

    There is a lively discussion on The Passive Voice about Kris Rusch’s recent blog post which challenges the use of the term “churn out” to describe writers who write quickly. In the comments, someone said that folks also use “formula” or “formulaic” as a pejorative. Another commenter said that in computer design, they use design patterns, and suggested that’s probably a better word. Here’s my response.

    Design pattern is right.

    The people who decry familiar patterns are those that completely misunderstand one of the main purposes of fiction.

    Readers go to fiction to have an emotional experience–thrill, horror, dread, falling in love, mirth, wonder, wish-fulfillment, etc.

    Those emotions are not created out of nothing.

    They’re not created haphazardly.

    They are generated by a specific . . . pattern.

    1. You receive some stimulus–from your environment or your own thoughts or something you’re lead to think, such as via a book.

    2. You make an assessment about what’s going on and what might happen in the future and how that impacts you or someone else. There are two assessment systems. One is incredibly quick. Almost subconscious. The other is a bit slower. You can read about them in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow and Jenefer Robinson’s Deeper Than Reason. Robinson even relates the science to fiction.

    3. If the assessment says it’s something that will affect you or someone you can sympathize with, you feel an emotion. The emotion focuses your attention. For example, if there’s a mountain lion stalking you, you don’t want to forget she’s there. It also prepares you to act–to pursue something desirable, avoid something that’s not, etc. It also writes that emotion on the face to communicate it to others to solicit help or warn (we are social animals).

    Okay, so certain cues or assessments are required to produce certain emotions. If the cues aren’t there, the emotion doesn’t arise.

    Certain stimuli lead to an assessment that there’s a threat. Other stimuli lead to assessments that there’s an opportunity, for love, money, sex, security, etc.

    Suspense, surprise, and curiosity have all been studied in experiments. There’s a certain structure required for each. If you take the same story, but simply change the structure, you end up with different reader effects. See more here.

    This means that a reader who wants to feel the experience of falling in love is going to have to be guided through the pattern of cues that produce the assessments that lead to the emotion.

    There are lots of variations in the pattern that will work. But we can’t give a reader the pattern for horror and expect them to feel romance.

    Duh.

    You can’t give a reader a downer ending and expect her to feel joy.

    Again, there are certain delights readers are going to certain genres for. Folks read romance after romance precisely because those romances do specific things to them. And they want to experience them again and again.

    For example, one thing romance readers love is the joy of a happily-ever-after (HEA) ending. So if that’s what they’re looking for, then that’s what the product must provide for them to be satisfied. We follow patterns, but change them enough so that the reader doesn’t get bored.

    So, yeah. Patterns. It’s like the very essence of what we’re doing.

    We are all working with patterns, whether we know it or know. And the sooner we learn what the general patterns are for the type of story we’re trying to tell, which could also be called the type of experience we’re trying to provide, the quicker we gain control over our writing.

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7 Comments

  1. Really informative post, John. I’ve made an effort to write a number of short stories each year when I need a change of pace from novel-writing, but (for me) it’s a tough market to break into. I think I’ll keep writing more shorts from time to time, but it’ll probably stay second-priority after my novels.
    I’ll have to take a closer look at J.A. Konrath’s posts there though–they look interesting.

  2. Konrath’s stuff IS interesting, although I approach it with caution. I’ve seen too many multi-level marketing, real estate, sales situations with a lot of hype and very low success rate. People ARE doing it, but very few out of the many, many, many who try. But, hey, that sounds like normal publishing 🙂

  3. How did you get Duotrope to list 200 pro-rate venues? I pick:
    * Payscale=Pro payment
    * Sort By=Pay (high-low)
    & the site complains “You have not entered enough search criteria!”

    If I specify Genre=General, then I get 89 markets.

    What’s your secret, pls?

  4. Glenn, it appears Duotrope has changed its search method since I wrote this (which was about a month or two before I published it here). At the time, I just did a wide open search on pay rate. To get the full list now it appears you’d now need to select Pro-payment, then do a search by each story length, copy each results list to Excel, and then sort and remove duplicates. For example, I just did one on pro-payment, any genre, short story length and got a result of 112 venues. I’d need to do it for flash, novella, etc.

  5. John, thanks for the answer. Thus I will proceed, but I use a real database (MS-Access does qualify) rather than Excel (which gets clumsy quickly) for tracking submissions; I even wrote an application to handle matching my stories to markets, which I prefer to Duotrope’s support there (tho it beats most of what’s available, especially for free), partly because I dislike having to ignore the same markets over & over. I also sift thru Duotrope’s RSS feed every weekend (with another custom application), a good way to catch changes, posting my progress on Twitter with hashtag #writingmarket.

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