While I was out, John Scalzi had an interesting post about the changing economics of short story writing. Back in the day, Robert Heinlein made a living selling stories at a penny a word:
As I was reading this again I was curious as to what at penny in 1939 would rate out to here in 2007, so I used the Consumer Price Index Calculator from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis to find out. Turns out that to you'd need fifteen cents in today's money, more or less, to equal the buying power of that 1939 penny. Dropping Heinlein's $70 into the calculator, you find that it was the equivalent of $1,034.89 today. Which is, you know, fairly decent.
It's also entirely out of the reach of today's beginning science fiction writers -- and for most of the established writers as well. Analog, which is the current incarnation of Astounding, pays 6 to 8 cents a word for stories up to 7,500 words, and a beginning writer should expect to be on the low end of that pay scale. So a 7,000 word story -- the length of "Life-Line," Heinlein's debut -- will bring in $420. For those of you wondering, that's $28.41 in 1939 dollars. One reasonably wonders if Heinlein would have bothered writing for a living if that were the sum he could have expected to get from the top magazine in the field.
There's a good deal of discussion in the comments, as well, most of which is well worth reading.
This was particularly interesting to me because back in May, when Jennifer Ouelette visited campus, she talked to our students about life as a freelance science writer. She was asked about the economics of writing science stories for magazines, and said that, basically, if they didn't pay at least a dollar a word, it wasn't worth the effort.
She also noted that book writing required the most effort for the least reward, saying something like "It's a real kick to have someone give you $20,000 for a book, but remember, that takes a year to write." Books are fun, but shorter writing is what pays the bills.
I'm less clear on the typical range of novel payouts for SF (other than John's humorous taxonomy), but it seems almost like genre fiction and non-fiction are mirror images-- from various comments online, it looks like novels are the best way to get paid for SF, while short writing offers the best return for science writers. If you can manage it, the optimal strategy is probably to write short non-fiction to pay the bills, and do your novel-length SF writing as a sideline.
"What about blogging?" you ask. Well, I'm much too lazy to actually tally up the words that I write in a month, but a Fermi-style back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests that I get Heinlein money. That is, not-adjusted-for-inflation Heinlein money-- about a penny a word. Which is anomalously high, for reasons that aren't worth getting into.
Now, the blog has its own rewards, and the monthly check from Seed is a nice bonus, so I'm not knocking it. But it's a good thing I've got a day job...
- Log in to post comments
JK Rowling receives some $(US)5/(book sold) royalties. Is she complaining per word?
Harry Potter 1 76,944 words
Harry Potter 2 85,141 words
Harry Potter 3 107,253 words
Harry Potter 4 190,637 words
Harry Potter 5 257,045 words
Harry Potter 6 168,923 words
Harry Potter 7 204,941 words
So it's really not hard to make a living writing; all you have to do is be the most financially successful author in the entire world, and you're fine.
Now, what I'd be curious to see is a comparison of the declining buying power of short fiction authors, contrasted with the amount of money that the magazine publishers or their executives are bringing in. Have the magazines managed to contrive a way to share increasingly less with their authors, or is it just that short fiction magazines are no longer a financially viable medium? (Neither would surprise me-- I honestly know *nobody*, even hardcore sf geeks, who read the short story magazines at this point.)
I think television has replaced the short story. (It also did in the KKK, but that was a good thing).
Into the 1960s there was a big market for short stories in magazines. There were the classic pulps, the science fiction magazines, the women's romance magazines, men's adventure magazines, tales of the west magazines, mystery magazines, war magazines, sporting magazines and a host of other outlets and genres. These all barely exist nowadays. Short stories show up here and there, but most magazines are full of news, gossip, press releases, and analysis. A short story is a rarity.
What happened?
My feeling is that the short story has been replaced by the television episode. The timing is about right. Television hit its stride in the 1960s, just as the magazines started to drop short stories. The 30 or 60 minute television format was comparable in narrative duration to that of a short story and had a comparable reading time.
With a smaller market for short stories, there is less money to pay per word.
Thanks to the internet, with the rise of the blog, the online essay, and the short video, the magazine world continues to implode, and even television has been feeling the pinch. Given the rise of scripted "reality" shows and the fights over DVD rights, the networks and producers have been working hard to cut television writer salaries, partly on general principle, partly because THEY are making less money per word.
It's interesting that you, as a blogger, report that you are earning Heinlein money. This suggests some equilibrium in certain classes of popular writing. When blogs are dead, and we're all using quantum field ESP to tell each other stories, will QFE story tellers / essayists find themselves counting the quatloos per word and after a brief transmunance with whatever has replaced the Federal Reserve announce that they are making Heinlein (or Orzel) money?
From my experience, the situation in "literary" fiction is similar to genre fiction. When I took fiction writing in college, the prof hammered into us that we should approach short story writing as a warm up to writing novels, which were the only real way to make money. Literary journals simply can't afford to pay very much.
Short story writing is also a gateway drug towards screenplays and teleplays. It is easier to write a screenplay or a teleplay as an adaptation of a sort story (or novella) than as an adaptation of a novel.
In a novel, there is the question of what to leave out. In a novel, many things happen, usually to various people. In a short story, something happens to someone.
I strongly agree that one cannot earn a (USA Major City) living anymore exclusively by writing short stories. One can barely earn a living exclusively by writing novels. But one can earn a living exclusively by writing for television, film, or games.
I do not count writing for a corporation as an employee. I do not count being a Writer in Residence. That is Work for Hire, and some sort of complicated academic patronage, respectively. I do not count textbooks. Fiction, just Fiction.
There is much more that I could say, as a member of a family that has had at least 10 professional writer/editors/book industry members. But I prefer to respect Chad's gentle reminders that I not name-drop nor bloviate.
Thank you for this discussion. It is VERY important to "content creators" and thus rather important for content consumers.
Toby Buckell's done a couple of surveys on SF author advances. The median first novel advance he found was about $5K, the median overall $12.5K (for science fiction) to $15K (for fantasy). As discussed at Writer Beware, you're not going to live on those advances, and you're not going to live on writing at all unless either you have several books on the shelves earning royalties, or you're willing to live the ascetic retro lifestyle of a Howard Waldrop.