Hiya. I'm not a writer, I'm someone that creates a number of things for his own giggles. I've realized recently that I may have some marketable skill in writing and, what the hell, I'll look into whether or not I can make money on this.
That said, I don't know where to start. SO, I'm hoping there's a thingy around here- a page, a topic, something- where someone's gone into how to start trying to do this for the big money bucks I know all writers are pulling down. How does one "submit" a "story," and... who the hell is paying money for stories anyway?
Please give me an beginner's guide to your hard-won knowledge so I can become your direct competition in as few steps as possible, thanks so much.
Read this.
Holler with follow-up questions.
Bummer for you tom - Duotrope goes paid on Jan. 1. If you plan on submitting a lot of shorts etc, it's invaluable (though there is some debate about that).
Tom, once you find publication markets that publish the kind of stories you write, go to each of their websites and find the "Submissions Guidelines" and those tell you how to submit your stories to them, usually through email. Every place may have a different submissions process, so it's good to pay attention and send them exactly what they ask for.
There's an article here by Richard Thomas about what those emails should generally look like.
Annnnd how does one find publication markets? Does that just mean broad genres?
This is one of the things duotrope is for.
Tom, do you have a story that you think is ready?
Publication markets = magazines, journals, anthologies, websites. Check out Duotrope immediately, since you've still got a couple days to use their search engine. You can search by genre, pay scale, etc. There are other places to find out about places as well, for me other than doing searches like on Duotrope the best way I find new publications is just keeping track of writers I like and seeing where they've published, or talking to people here about where they are submitting. I keep bookmarks of most of the publications I'm interested in, organized by genre and then broken into tiers; the top paying markets, the more prestigious markets, and then just generally cool markets that I like.
I haven't read enough of your stuff to remember exactly your style of fiction or any particular genre, but if there's a certain style you're going for maybe I can give a you a quick list of places to check out. I know Richard Thomas said he's putting an article here with his huge 300+ list of markets he likes at some point, so keep an eye out for that too.
$.05/word is the pro rate, pretty much the best you can hope for outside of contests and lucky instances. Most places don't pay pro rate if they pay at all, even some well-known places that you'd want your name in. Each place is different, usually you are committing to First Electronic Rights or First Print Rights, and those commonly say that they should be the only place to publish that piece for a year, or two, or whatever.
Yeah, there's no real money going on in fiction.
/watches Tom's dreams crumble to dust
Sorry Tom. Look on the bright side: once you sell a couple dozen or so high profile stories, you can get a book deal and make roughly the same money a mid-level project manager at a small company makes! Won't that be something!
All of a sudden, I don't feel much like writing.
Doing what you love and suffering for it is what makes you a mensch. I do this because I love to write. I can't publish shit because I'm a shitty writer, but I'm working on it. I would love to be able to support my family with with it - I don't know if I ever will, but that's a goal. I'm lucky to have multiple goals - one of the others is to write cool software and give my kids the kind of upbringing I didn't get, so it works out well for me. The rest of you are probably fucked though. Merry Christmas!
If you publish 4 or 5 5k word stories a week at pro rate, you'd be doing pretty damn well. Just be better. Though, fact, freelancing non-fiction pays heaps more, around the same kinda money you'd make as a fry cook.
If it's that hopeless, why does anyone do this? Is spending hours on something that's going to net you thirty bucks, if you're lucky enough to be chosen to spend hours making thirty bucks, rewarding? What's the endgame? Is this just a hobby that people pick up a little extra with?
Aren't you in a band?
case closed.
I know right? I mean, if there is one thing with a poorer outlook than writer - it's got to be music.
Tom - as a fellow musician - there's that thing about not quitting your day job. We pursue creative interests because we're passionate, not because of the money.
Me, like anyone, I'd love to support myself by writing. I'm realistic that it is very unlikely to happen. But I'm still pursuing a life in that direction. And once you get published, maybe a degree, there are other ways to make money than just pumping out fiction. I have a friend who has an MFA in poetry. He works for a pretty big corp putting economic terms into digestible reads for intra-company paperwork. Prior to that, he'd never takem an economic class. He just be good with the words. He makes bank. He writes his poetry on his time. Writes his music and busks in Boston on his time.
But yeah, it's a grinders game. I think the key is to find ways to support yourself so you don't hate yourself and still have the energy for your creative outlets. If you can start to make money off it, awesome. If not, oh well. You have to have that attitude. You're doing it for the love of it, not the money. And at the same time, you hold on to that hope/dream that the money might come. Because it does for some people.
I saw advice from Neil Gaiman, it was something along the lines of creating things to be proud of. He said when he chased the money, he often felt disappointed and bitter. But if he created things he was proud of, then at the very least, he had that.
Advice to live by.
From a purely making-money standpoint...Tom, why not follow the JA Konrath model? The Newbie Guide to Publishing guy.
If you want to make money at writing, put out a ten part fictional series of whatever length as ten separate ebook novellas on Amazon's Kindle site, then do it again. And again. Write them to the best of your ability. Write them with love. Check 'em for typos. Slap an attractive cover on it - format it for Amazon. Fire it off...
Charge 99 cents for each part.
When someone in the great cyber nether-world discovers Part 6 of your series floating amongst the millions of ebooks on Amazon, they'll come to realize there's another 9 parts out there they'd like to read and will pay for the pleasure. Next thing you know they write positive reviews on all ten parts - and then start in on your next ten-parter. Then someone else happens along based on those good reviews, and does the same thing - bam, more sales, more positive reviews. And so on. And so on.
Okay, so you might not become a millionaire, but it might get you paid as much as you'd be paid doing something you hate - and with a 30% royalty rate no less (70% if you charge more than 99 cents). Hell, you don't even have to edit your work all that much; just ask Amanda Hocking.
*Bracing for the purist hate I'm surely about to receive.
Tom, I believe you can also read your amazon download on your laptop or tablet as well. Not sure on that.
25,000 fans? Golden opportunity. Built in audience. Set up a Kindle Direct Publishing account, get some of covers for your stories, and sell each of them separately. 99 cents for shorts, something more for longer works. No gatekeepers, no rejection letters, just money in your pocket.
While you're at it, feel free to send all those fawning eyeballs to my piece of crap first stab at beginning a sci-fi series "Bloodline: Prelude to the Cannibal Collapse". Yes, it's bad...but it's also 99 cents. I wrote it, one draft, that's it - e-published it. I make nothing from it, but that's because that's not how Amazon works. To make money there, you have to have a bunch of things published...you make money by way of the "long tail".
You could be sitting on your solution to getting away from doing something you dislike for a living - pretty cool.
Nobody's crushing anyone's dream around here. Yes, it's hard, and yes, it's time-consuming, but it's also rewarding, fulfilling, and fucking fun to write. None of us would be here if we didn't agree with that. We all know it's not technically realistic to write for a living, but damned if I'm not going to do it for life.
Here's the thing: there's definitely not money in selling short stories. Once you have enough credits, are good enough, and know enough about submitting, you can probably make about a hundred bucks a week selling your stories... but that'll be years from now. Don't let that stop you. Do a pyramid style submission schedule: get a huge number of stories published on free sites, then half that on token payment (less than 1 cent per word, usually a lump sum like five dollars per page or something similar), then half of that on semi-pro (1 cent to 4.9 cents per word), then turn the pyramid over and start submitting to pro markets.
I've noticed that you talk a lot about music in general, not just specific to your band, too. Someone already mentioned freelance non-fiction; why not look for a job writing reviews? It's not fiction writing, and not nearly as fun (to me), but if you have a passion for it, why not? Find a magazine geared towards your genre (and honestly, I usually see harder rock reviews alongside horror and genre magazines, not sure why) and then start seeing if anyone is looking for applicants. Or, just write a bunch of fucking reviews and submit.
Don't let this shit get you down. Kward is right, there's the serial idea. A huge market exists for erotica short stories, which can be published as books on Amazon. A really popular style of selling is to offer the first for free and the rest (be it sequels or similar tastes) for .99, then 1.99, then 2.99 for the rest.
There are dozens of ways around "the system." Make enough money writing erotica to support you while you write the Great American Novel, or go shovel shit for a living and write at night. Just don't stop writing, and don't get discouraged.
A note about submissions: yes, it's bullshit that they ask so much. I'm not joking, a magazine literally said "put Sparkle Pony beneath your contact info to prove you read this page." I haven't seen that shit since, like, MySpace. Anyway, it can be tough and boring and take hours, but the more you submit, the more likely you are to get paid.
Tom, my opinion is that the days when someone could make a good living writing short stories are long gone. That was in the time of Dorothy Parker and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I guess it's because of all the competing entertainment now. There is more supply than than demand.
But that's not the magazines' fault, that comes from the paying/reading public. Most of the publishers aren't taking advantage, they just don't make any money and do it "for the love" themselves. Even the ones that pay are usually more an honor payment than anything that pays bills. Like with the rest of the arts, we do it because we're crazy it's fun.
From what I hear, non-fiction is a different animal. "Professional pay" is five cents a word for fiction (lolol?). Times that by ten or twenty (?) for nonfiction. Also, not sure how reliable this is, but I heard that 90% of books sold are nonfiction. There's a huge paying market there (excluding memoirs). If making money with writing was my priority, I'd look that way.
LOL! I guess it depends on what they're trying to learn. :P
85% of them are Dummies books.
Tom, it's not all submissions and self-publishing. Sometimes you just gotta look in a different direction. For example, I get paid to write (on a contract basis) for Wizards of the Coast. I work evenings and weekends on my schedule, for about 7 or 8 months out of the year, and what I get paid is based on accepted submissions. The better I write = the more money I make. It's certainly not enough to live on, but it's a nice supplement. Plus I get bragging rights when I play cards with my friends and get to say "I wrote that" or "I named that card". AND I get to feel like I'm a professional writer, not just a struggling amateur. AND I get to put that on my resume when I send that out looking for more contract work, or something like that. AND I've got a foot in the door, in case I ever had enough time/energy/skill/confidence to branch into other things that they publish, like D&D novels or stuff like that.
My point is not to say how awesome that job is (even though it really is the bee's knees). My point is: don't get discouraged by the difficulty of the "normal" route. Just find an alternate route to writing for a living.
I think to a certain extent it almost works in reverse; doing stuff for free doesn't help when you are just starting and there is no old product for people to go buy. Once you have a books/short stories/whatever that people can buy it might be worth it.
@ Tom also the 76 bucks thing doesn't have to be all you make off it. There are reprints, and anthologies and what not. Later if you get more well known collections of your work. It isn't a huge amount, but it can bring in dribs and drabs for quite a while.
Dufrescm you write magic cards? That is the coolest thing I've heard all day! I havent played seriously in a couple years other than the occasional fun draft, but man that has got to be my favorite game ever. You're the man!
@ Jeffrey: I've been writing names and flavor text for about 6 years now (I started with Planar Chaos). I got that gig by sending and email to Matt Cavotta (who was writing the flavor of Magic articles on their website back then). It was a terrible attempt at a "query letter", but he gave me a shot, and it worked out. Aside from all of the other cool stuff the job gives me, I've learned how to be very concise when I need to be - those cards don't leave much room for text, most of the time. Also, I am a woman ;)
I just finished reading one of the many awesome Chuck Palahniuk essays on this site, and it ended with: "If nothing else, it’s important to see that your goal is something done by human beings no smarter or stronger or more anything than yourself. Keep telling yourself: “If that horse’s ass can write a book and find a publisher, then it should be easy for me…”, which seemed like pretty good advice, considering the discussion we're having here. :D
They let girls write magic cards???
*burns all cards*
To me, the money question brings up another question. Who's crazier, the ones who only do what they get paid for or the ones who do what they enjoy even if they don't get paid?
Not that I have an answer or anything...
Dollars is how the man holds you down.
True that, Tom!
Wouldn't it be crazy to pass up money we could get for something we'd probably do anyway? Money is how we show each other something has value, and nothing wrong with wanting your writing to be something people value.
I might give it a try, but if the rate is 5 cents a word at best, I'll just keep doing art.
I'm not saying that you don't need money. The approach seemed a little jaded to me. I think you should participate in the arts for the arts. I'm a fan of being genuine. Are you a writer, or a money maker?
The approach seemed a little jaded to me. I think you should participate in the arts for the arts. I'm a fan of being genuine. Are you a writer, or a money maker?
I couldn't agree more.