Journal Entry
Writing neepery: short story pay!
John Scalzi’s been talking about short stories: how much he’s made at them, and how some people try to pay insultingly low rates and some writers pay it, something he calls Writer Stockholm Syndrome, which I love.
This spurs thought about handling short fiction from Sarah Monette, Cat Valente, and Jim Hines.
Lots of good thoughts all around. Bill Schafer from Subterranean Press, however, makes a comment that rings true to me here in Cat’s journal when he says:
“what you really need to consier is setting a *minimum* you’ll accept for a short story” … “The writers I’ve known who did this — some certainly not as well known as John is — almost inevitably didn’t see the demand for their work drop much, but did see a nice bump in their income.”
Scalzi’s onto something with ‘Writer Stockholm Syndrome.’ I often say that no one can make as disastrous a bad choice as a smart person, because they sell it to themselves really well. Writers included. That’s why intelligent, but desperate-to-be-published people will create the most fascinating internal narratives about what they’re doing.
When asked about how to submit to short story markets, I have a little question that goes something like this:
“How much do you value yourself and how much do you believe in the work you just did? Are you hoping one day to make a living at this? Does this action put your work in front of a large group of people? Editors in the field? Does it help you make a living?”
I value myself higher, and adjust accordingly from time to time. When I started out, I valued myself rather lowly, and set the lower limit differently (writing was a hobby, I made a living elsewhere, I was trying to break in), but I think its important to have a cut point, where you say ‘below this, I will not sell my work, but keep it for later. I can rewrite it then, with better skills, or sell it when I’ve sold other things.’
When beginning after some false starts (I have my first check ever, for $8, on my wall), I set 3 c/w as my limit, with two exceptions, a pair of magazines that I knew editors and people in the field read despite the limited pay.
People I told this too told me to ‘work my way up’ and ‘practice my skills’ in lower markets. They’re still doing that, by the way. It’s horrible advice. They claim to value their own art, but their actions speak differently to me. Because practice means ‘trying to get better.’ Not lowering the basket and leaving it there so you can say ‘look at me, I can dunk!’ Unless you start raising the basket a bit each day I don’t see it helping. But strangely enough, most people don’t do this.
I noticed that valuing myself higher, and working for the higher rates, gave me results.
Now I look at how long it will take to write a story, figure out how much and whether the time matches what I need in order to make a living or I’m taking food away from my family’s mouths. And it isn’t 1/5 of a cent a word. Or 3 cents a word. Usually it’s around 10 cents a word. If I have an open invitation, I’ll keep things in mind, a two day or daylong short story is doable sometimes for less. But since getting sick, I no longer am able to pull a massive sprint to finish a story. It’s now a very slow, deliberate, week long thing. I don’t have that crazy all night energy anymore. So I’ve pretty much stopped working for less than 10 cents a word on fiction for the most part (and since I’ve made 25 cents/word to $2/word on nonfiction, that has made it easier to make this call).
It took getting sick to raise my personal rate lower limit, out of a desire to work smart/not hard with what resources I had. It was scary, because I turned down work. For three months there was a slight lull. Since then, work has picked right back up to levels previous.
I think evaluating your goals, and your levels of return for time and effort invested, is part of being a smart business person. It’s also an obligation to your art, for the more return you get for effort, the more you can block out time to do things on your own terms and at your own pace, without danger of burnout or substandard work.
Filed under the topic Journal on December 7th 2009 at 5:17 pm. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.
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1. dianacacy on Dec 7th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
So true!
And I run a few of the low paying markets. I’d add too to learn about the market you’re going for and the people involved with it. Do they have a vision for their publication? Do they have a good circulation?
You’ve brought to my attention another area I neglect. Letting others know my vision for the ones I run. It’s important. If you’re sending your stories to a lower paying market, there better be a benefit to replace the money. I suspect many know I have a five year vision of going pro with my markets and are willing to give me a shot at getting there. For without the writers who are generous enough to submit to us, it would never happen.
Lower paying markets can be an option for your reprints or your retired pieces also. Still…better be a benefit to doing so. I have one I’ll submit to where I might only get $2-5 for a piece. Terrible price, but the exposure I get from it helps in other ways. And the publisher’s a nice fellow.
2. Tobias Buckell on Dec 7th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
“Terrible price, but the exposure I get from it helps in other ways.”
Like how, exactly. I’m curious as to what these other helps are?
3. Mark Terry on Dec 7th, 2009 at 6:45 pm
I took a bounce of Scalzi’s blog, too, discussing economies of scale in publishing. I think you might find it relevant.
http://www.markterrybooks.com/2009/12/money.html
4. Mike Resnick on Dec 7th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
I can’t speak for your other Clarion professors, but the week you were my student at Clarion, I never told you to start cheap and work your way up. That way lies disaster. Once word gets out that you’ll work cheap — it only takes one or two sales to a known semi-pro market — you’re labeled, book or magazine, as someone who will always cave during negotiations. Or to put it another way: if you don’t value your writing more highly, why should any editor or publisher?
5. Tobias Buckell on Dec 7th, 2009 at 10:14 pm
Mike: yeah, you’re one of the reasons I created a lower limit. When I talked to writers who made a living, they all had a similar outlook
6. Michael Canfield on Dec 8th, 2009 at 12:53 am
Some good discussions, especially at the blogs you linked to above. It seems most writers are generally in sympathy with Scalzi’s original argument but tend to carve out exceptions based on their own publishing histories. Electric Velocipede, LCRW, Flytrap and Talebones are generally considered okay, it seems. That’s basically my feeling too. There is a distinction between types of low-paying markets. Having looked at the Black Matrix site, it’s the kind of thing that litters Ralan and Duotrope that I have no patience for. “We want stories and lots of them,” says BM. We want stories in the vein of Robert Jordan, Heinlein, Koontz: you know: the stuff that’s really hard to find and the mainstream press is not doing enough of. Write us something like Starship Troopers and we will publish it and pay you (it’ll just be much much less than Heinlein used to get when he was starting out.) There is so much of this dross. So many markets who want the “good old stuff” and are easy to spot by their fractal pay rates and the “gosh wow” prose style of their endlessly-specific guidelines. I wrote a parody of these on the form of fake zombie anthologies on my blog a couple months ago, which got one comment. The comment was from a person objecting to one of the markets estimating a 65 month response time. The commentor thought this was high, which goes to show I didn’t make the parody broad enough.
That’s one side of it. I understand the need for writers to make money. I’ll tell you the stupidest thing I ever did, and it wasn’t selling to a $5 or $10 market, or giving a story to a non-paying market (all of which I’ve done at least once too.) The stupidest thing I ever did was accepted a reduced rate from a pro paying market. The market is no longer around, but what happened was this:
My second year of publishing, I submitted my story, which was around 7k, after their first market notice appeared. They wrote back saying they loved the story, but had a problem: they were over budget. They explained they were new, were still working out the kinks, etc, but they had bought too many long stories and could offer me only $300 rather than $350 their guidelines specified, with of course their complete understanding if I declined. At this time the story had already been rejected 10 or 11 times (excluding a couple non-responses). I accepted the deal. The next couple months were a nightmare, as the editor soon sent me an “edit” of my story which was 2000 words longer than my original draft. 2000 words longer. I considered pulling the story, but instead decided to work through every single edit. One gem of an addition I still remember is “[Character X] stood still, an IMMOBILE statue,” — as opposed to the more common ambulatory statues, I suppose. Another edit changed my single word paragraph where a character says: “No.” to: “‘No,’ he said. The single word said it all.” (Or apparently it didn’t.) The experience of getting all this garbage back out of the story, (and avoiding a citing by Thog’s Masterclass) was painful, caused me to doubt myself as a writer. Was my draft really so bad that the editor thought the additions (some of which were entirely contrary to my intent for the story, and often had characters behave in ways which were inconceivable to me) really added to the story. In fairness to the editor, after this was all finally sorted out, he did write and, sort-of, I think, admit he may have gone a little overboard in his rewrite. The story eventually was reprinted in a Best Of anthology, and we all lived happily every after. The first clue was the reduced pay offer. In fact I believe this is what is commonly known by people a little more savvy than myself as a “red flag.” I should have pulled out then. I would do that today. In fact, if they advertised $5.00 and said the could only pay $4.40 I would pull out. I certainly don’t think the editor thought, “aha, here’s a sucker, we shaved him down fifty bucks and now we can sodomize his story line by line.” I don’t think he thought the CONSCIOUSLY that is, but I’d be lying if I didn’t think I opened myself up for the treatment I got. The editor, I want to stress, is not a bad guy. He’s not even a bad writer and has had stories appear in well-respected pro venues since that time. I don’t think he knew what he was doing, and neither did I, but the blame falls on me, because it was my story and it’s my writing that I put at stake.
All this is a long-winded way of saying I agree with proposition you’ve got to have standards. The problem, or the one each writer needs to think about for herself is, what standards are right? If editors are coming to you asking for stories it’s time to set a minimum rate, no argument there. And there’s definitely some markets to be avoided. I try to avoid markets that have art that looks like it would be more appropriate on binder left in homeroom in the 1970′s for example. I avoid retro markets. If you’re not paying for fiction, I admit to respecting your motives more if you looking to find the stories the establish markets are not ready for: that are not now thought commercially viable (and my never be — most experiments do fail after all), and NOT to recreate and imitate types of stories that were once commercially viable, but have fallen out of fashion. We don’t need Doc Savage rip-offs. We already have Doc Savage.
By careful attention to the actual time I spent on a few short stories written in the last year, I estimate that my real rate of production from brainstorming (if I do any) through the six or seven drafts I usually do, works out to about 150 words an hour. 150 x 5cents = $7.50 an hour. I live in Washington State where the minimum wage is $8.55 so writing fiction, at the accepted “professional rates” paid by genre markets is either a very stupid waste of time or something that I do for more than just the pay: maybe some would call those unprofessional reasons. Some, repeat SOME, of the low- and no-pay markets or moving the genre(s) forward in new directions. The editors of the majors might disagree: but I don’t see every single one of the most interesting writers represented there. I don’t see Thedora Goss there, or Nisi Shawl very often, or dozens of others. There are mags out there (EV, Flurb, others) that say, more or less, send your weird stuff.
The last thing I want to say is as a reader, as lover of short stories, especially weird, odd, fucked-up, quirky stories, and not as a writer. Thomas Ligotti spent the first half of his career in venues like Grue, and various Lovecraft fanzines, before he started getting collected, and before Weird Tales and he found each other (WT is of course, a “semi-pro” paying market). If at the time he started out, he had held out for decent pay, we might never have had him, and today he is regarded as one of (if not THE) most innovative and essential horror short story writers since Lovecraft. He’s been published in F&SF, I believe, once. But that’s F&SF’s problem.
7. dianacacy on Dec 8th, 2009 at 1:17 am
Hey Tobias, I probably should have not said anything because I hate to go into detail at all. It’s contrary to the right advice. I had a rare occurrence. Someone saw a poem, asked if I wrote other fiction, and asked if I could write something else. Ended up with a ghost writing job out of it.
A good experience, but I was stupid. I’ve continued writing, but stopped submitting. I should have progressed at that point. That’s one area of my life being corrected over this next year.
The other benefits to me have nothing to do with making money from writing fiction, and really don’t belong here. My real point is that your submission activities better match your writing career goals.
Pretty much what you and others are saying.
8. Tobias Buckell on Dec 8th, 2009 at 1:25 am
Diana: it wasn’t an attack, I was curious. I get a lot of people who tell me ‘exposure’ is the reward to no-pay/small-pay outlets, which may be true, but I like to quantify if they’ve experienced any quantifiable results from that, or are they still hoping for it.
Obviously I believe free work can build a useful outreach effort, it’s why I blog here at TobiasBuckell.com
But its exposure I control and grow with each passing year 
9. Michael Canfield on Dec 8th, 2009 at 1:32 am
“Terrible price, but the exposure I get from it helps in other ways.”
Like how, exactly. I’m curious as to what these other helps are?
I can think of a couple minor ones, some of my Flytrap stories got honorable mentions in the old Datlow/Link/Grant best of, (the value of the hon. mentions is probably nil, esp. when they leave off the last two letters of your surname, but it feels like acceptance anyway).
-Unless of course the pro editors are scouring these to make listes of writers who have published semi-pro (as in Black Gate or WT) so they can label them as someone who will always cave in negotiations, then that would be bad.
And there are low-and-no pay stories that have been nominated for awards or been accepted in Best of or other reprint anthologies. I think that a story that is never published originally, has of later appearing in a Best Of is close to nil.
10. dianacacy on Dec 8th, 2009 at 9:26 am
No problem. I didn’t take it as an attack.
I think the results one gets from the exposure is more of a personal nature, rather than anything quantifiable in the terms you’re thinking of.
Honestly, if you place your story with a publication that pays little to nothing, you must have a reason for doing so. I’d be interested in knowing the reasons more directly and in more detail why some do myself. Beyond the ones who have low-self esteem and just don’t think they’d ever get accepted elsewhere – and those who are just uneducated.
11. Rob Darnell on Dec 8th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s been told I aim too high.
12. Brad R. Torgersen on Dec 11th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
My first sale happened last month, and I already got the first of two $500 checks for it. When it’s all said and done, I’ll have earned 12¢ a word for the story, which I wrote earlier in the year.
That’s significantly above SFWA minimum, but also well below what a real Name can command, based on the venue.
Still, having made 12¢ a word, I can’t see why I’d want to go backwards and start taking less than SFWA minimum, unless the venue was doing charity and proceeds were going to a cause I liked.
Anyway, I blathered about it a little here, and Mary Robinette Kowal seemed to agree. 5¢ per word is the floor, not the ceiling.
And yes, I think everyone who has spent any time as an unpublished, unsold aspirant feels that quiet desperation to be published. It can get mighty bad at times. So much so that some days you feel like you’d be thrilled if anyone came and offered you anything, however eensy-beensy, for what you’re writing.
I’m glad my first sale was for a significant sum. I feel like my personal “bar” has been set fairly high, and even if it means lots of additional rejections and lots of additional waiting until the next sale, I believe it will be worth it to keep submitting only to markets which can promise a word rate that meets or exceeds the SFWA minimum.