[HN Gopher] My experience writing and selling a short story
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My experience writing and selling a short story
Author : superamit
Score : 86 points
Date : 2022-07-12 20:13 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (superamit.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (superamit.substack.com)
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| This is an excellent view on how writing speculative fiction
| actually works. Amit's publication to Tor should be lauded as a
| serious achievement in his career and not something that an
| average person could reasonably expect to achieve/plan for.
| Congratulations to him.
|
| Please consider reading the work itself here:
| https://www.tor.com/2022/06/01/india-world-amit-gupta/
| Hayvok wrote:
| Agreed, Tor is a very respected publishing house in the sci-
| fi/fantasy genres.
|
| He's joining company with works like Enders Game, Wheel of
| Time, Mistborn, and Stormlight Archive, and a dozen more I'm
| not able to remember off the top of my head.
| ankaAr wrote:
| Nice story!!
| ivraatiems wrote:
| It's worth noting that Tor's pay for authors is in the absolute
| top tier. I've had a short story published in a smaller
| publication, and they paid me $50 total - $25 for the first six
| months exclusivity, then $25 again for inclusion in an anthology.
| That is more typical for a starting out author.
|
| OTOH, getting published in Tor at all is a much much bigger
| achievement - congratulations to the author!
| keyle wrote:
| These figures are interesting for me. One day of contracting
| dwarfs that.
|
| You'd have to be absolutely passionate and have another income
| to do this, which is a shame. I think every craft should have
| its place. Clearly the market is terrible for writers; a bit
| like indie game makers nowadays.
|
| I hope you get a breakthrough though; because if you keep doing
| this, you're clearly passionate about your craft!
| munificent wrote:
| _> Clearly the market is terrible for writers; a bit like
| indie game makers nowadays._
|
| See also: musicians (recording, less so live performance),
| DJs, photographers, journalists, documentarians, etc.
|
| Essentially any creative pursuit where:
|
| 1) Making it carries high prestige and gratification.
|
| 2) The product can be reproduced digitally and appreciated by
| a large audience.
|
| 3) Technology to produce it has become cheaper.
|
| The basic market forces are sucking all the money out of it.
| I think it's good for a society for skilled creative people
| to be able to spend most of their time on their art instead
| of having to do it as a side gig. But we don't seem to have
| an economic system that currently supports it aside from a
| small number of lucky winners of the zeitgeist lottery.
| hamiltonians wrote:
| you mean thousands of dollars?
| f17 wrote:
| Short stories don't make a lot of money. $100 is a huge
| accomplishment. The goal is usually to have them spike sales
| for a novel, but even there (a) it's iffy, and (b) most novels
| only sell a couple thousand copies.
|
| Writing, unfortunately, remains something you have to get
| financially comfortable to be able to do... not a way to become
| financially comfortable. It's surprising that even in 2022 we
| haven't fixed that.
| dqpb wrote:
| I don't understand why you would sell for that amount.
| ivraatiems wrote:
| I wanted my story in print by somebody legit. Writing was not
| then and is not now my full time career, it's a hobby, but
| few things have compared to the excitement I felt when I
| heard I'd be published.
|
| Many writers will advise you that it's ok to let your work go
| for free, if it'll get you exposure. I made a deal with
| myself that I'd charge something for it.
| ghaff wrote:
| Because that's the market rate. The alternative is not to
| sell.
| spoonjim wrote:
| To get people to read what you've written.
| corrral wrote:
| Wait until you see the lit-fic market.
| f17 wrote:
| You don't do it for the money. You do it for exposure. If you
| sell a short story that goes viral, you'll probably get a
| six-figure advance (which is not as much as it sounds like)
| on your next novel. That said, the odds aren't great; writing
| is about the worst way to make money imaginable, in part
| because either there's no barrier to entry (self-publishing)
| or there are barriers to entry but they're dysfunctional and
| political (traditional publishing) and no one knows what's
| seriously good until it's been around for ~20 years.
| eloff wrote:
| My brother writes Sci Fi for a living. He's self taught and self
| published. He does well, he's sold over a million books. What
| many people don't know is he suffered from severe tendonitis that
| really narrowed his career options. He started writing because he
| could write using voice recognition software. Now he writes with
| a keyboard, as the pain is more manageable. I'm extremely proud
| of him for how well he's been able to carve out his own path in
| life, in the developing world, against adversity.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Jasper-T.-Scott/e/B00B7A2CT4%3Fref=db...
| ankaAr wrote:
| Wow, just wow.
|
| And thank you to share your brother's work.
|
| You don't need to say you are proud of your brother, I can see
| that in your words.
| superamit wrote:
| 30+ novels! Very impressive.
|
| How long did it take him to get to 1 million copies sold, and
| was there anything he did along the way that had an outsized
| impact on his success?
| eloff wrote:
| He's been writing for about 12 years, and he crossed the
| million threshold at least two years ago - so about a decade.
|
| I'm not sure about the answer to the second question, I'll
| ask him over a beer next time we get together. I would say
| that an important factor was investing in professional cover
| art, editing, etc. He also more or less timed the rise of
| Kindle books, quite by accident, and I think that also helped
| his career.
|
| But there's no substitute for caring about his work and
| putting in the time, which he definitely does.
| ordinaryradical wrote:
| Did anyone find it curious that the revision process highlights
| perceived moral impurities (immigrant deportation commentary,
| MAGA similarity) as story failures / problems?
|
| There's a profound sub-narrative here on self-censorship, what is
| or isn't acceptable within the bounds of fiction, and how genre
| in-groups police themselves toward Acceptable Messages.
| m0llusk wrote:
| To me it seems conscientious. It is good to know if story
| elements are likely to trigger issues from some historical
| parallel or other such. This is kind of like taking a moment to
| consider any scientific experiment in order to check if it may
| approach or even exceed some moral boundaries. Everything is
| contextual, and these are not so much hard limits as they are
| social harmonics that one could tune into or reflect as well as
| avoid.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Yeah, no.
|
| I'm an award winning published author and wokeness has taken
| over the publishing space to the point where you can't
| publish _anything_ negative about a few sacred cows, which
| are obvious to anyone with a working brain.
|
| I'll bet my bottom dollar it was a white woman lecturing to a
| brown man why he's being racist too.
| ordinaryradical wrote:
| What you said I vibe with. But notice that even if it was
| presented in that precise context ("do you intend to invoke
| this theme?") the author internalized it as _story problems_
| , hence we enter the territory of self-censorship.
|
| Also, I think it would be very optimistic to assume an editor
| is deploying the word "problematic" about your story as
| anything other than an attack on its appropriateness and
| validity.
|
| > where an eloquently written editorial review argued that it
| had problematic themes.
| pipnonsense wrote:
| superamit (or anyone else who writes fiction really), would you
| publish your stories on a "substack for fiction"?
|
| I already built it, although it is in Portuguese.
| https://www.confabulistas.com.br
|
| It would be easy to translate to English and try it in the US
| market. Is there any interest for that?
|
| It is just like Substack. You create your page, people subscribe
| and get your fiction by email. The main difference is that people
| can read your books from the beginning, from the first chapter,
| in installments. With Substack (or any newsletter platform) new
| people can only get the future emails from the time they
| subscribed. In my site people will receive the first
| installment/chapter of the book (you can have several books
| published in there, one can be "Short stories").
|
| It has the "paid subscribers" feature also.
|
| I built it mostly to myself, as I am starting a side-career as a
| fiction writer wanted to own my audience. Fiction writers
| currently don't have a good platform to both distribute their
| work and gather an audience. What I built does the job pretty
| well I think.
|
| Any interest?
| Havoc wrote:
| Nice! Purchased a copy. For those looking you need to add author
| name - doesn't show up with just title on amazon
|
| Haven't seen this before:
|
| >this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management
| Software (DRM) applied.
| superamit wrote:
| Wow, thanks! TBH I didn't even know Tor was selling it as a
| Kindle single for 99 cents.
|
| And DRM-free! Cool. Feel free to pirate, I guess.
| gizajob wrote:
| It's a pretty terrible, hackneyed, non-story, now I've read it.
| Flag me down all you like. Seems like the author is more
| interested in the stats about writing than the actual writing.
|
| Some simple advice would be to read some Neal Stephenson, Paul
| Auster, and China Mieville for starters, not Michael Crichton.
| Good writing is a serious art and craft. It's irrelevant how many
| hours a specific work takes down to the second. The author seems
| to think writing is hard and slow. It is slow, but after the
| first decade or two it gets quicker when the inspiration comes.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Neal Stephenson is a very poor storyteller. Most of his books
| are excuses for writing encyclopedic entries on certain topics,
| and packaging it as a story to make money.
| [deleted]
| m0llusk wrote:
| My guess is he was going after some subtle points that are not
| normally the focus in this genre, so for many readers it is
| going to come across as hollow.
| corrral wrote:
| > Some simple advice would be to read some Neal Stephenson,
| Paul Auster, and China Mieville for starters, not Michael
| Crichton.
|
| I'd love for fiction writing to be better, generally, but if
| you're looking to make a career of writing--which of those
| made/makes the most money?
|
| [EDIT] Incidentally, I'd put Stephenson on about the same level
| as Crichton. Worse in some respects, better in others.
| paulpauper wrote:
| writing has to be among the worst ways to make money, sorry to
| say
|
| you need top .5% talent and work ethic to maybe earn a lower-
| middle class salary
|
| A labor of love, as it's said
| oauch wrote:
| I'd be curious if short fiction writing was more lucrative
| several decades ago when literary magazines were a larger
| force. Was it more possible to survive as an independent writer
| before, or have the economics of writing always been so
| terrible?
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| You could in the past have made a career writing exclusively
| short fiction. Over time, however, short fiction became
| understood as a stepping stone towards novel writing where
| the "real money" was. However I would never call writing
| short fiction _lucrative_ in any sense, not even if you 're
| Ted Chiang.
| superamit wrote:
| From what I've read, people did make a living writing short
| stories at one point. You probably still had to write a LOT.
|
| There were many more pubs to publish to and more people
| bought short story anthologies.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Back in the pulp era it was common for authors to churn out
| books under multiple names. There's definitely a bit of
| that (including the questionable quality) in the self-
| publishing market but it's much less visible.
| kleer001 wrote:
| Things like rent and food were also relatively cheaper back
| then too.
| f17 wrote:
| This is a major factor. Also, day jobs were a lot more
| chill. Writers still complained about having to go to an
| office job, but you could use the copious downtime on
| some of the work. You wouldn't want to do hardcore
| creative first-draft writing at your office job, but you
| could edit for typos and do background reading.
|
| These days, so many fascistic surveillance technologies
| have been deployed to squeeze the downtime out of
| existence for most jobs. You could have a 1950s day job
| (well, if you were middle class) and be a writer, but you
| can't really have a 2020s day job and be a writer,
| because jobs are so much more stressful.
| xhevahir wrote:
| Short stories used to be the more lucrative form. Writers
| like F. Scott Fitzgerald made most of their income from
| selling short stories to magazines like Collier's or Esquire,
| not novels.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Alexandre Dumas serial published The Three Musketeers and
| The Count of Monte Cristo - being paid by the word - which
| is why they're so long - but also extra impressive how good
| they turned out.
|
| The stories were not finished while the beginnings were
| being published.
| corrral wrote:
| It used to be possible to make a living doing nothing but
| writing for "pulps".
|
| This hasn't been a realistic goal since... IDK, the 50s? 60s?
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| Writing is a solid way to make money in specific genres,
| however, especially if one is self-published. A business-saavy
| writer can make a good amount of money writing romance (which
| makes more money than most other genres combined) or self-help.
| nibbleshifter wrote:
| A former manager of mine had a whole side gig writing direct-
| to-kindle romance and erotica for quite a while. Not bad
| money in it either.
| kleer001 wrote:
| Those two seem like the best time:money ratio genres. Lots
| of turn over, lots of fans with pretty forgiving quality
| filters.
|
| I'd be happy selling my one book fairly well. Though I keep
| hearing that it's series and series of series that do the
| best.
| cableshaft wrote:
| My wife is heading down that path right now. There are people
| she collabs with that made $200k in their first year of
| writing romance novels (but they wrote like, six books in a
| year. You need to churn them out quick to make that much
| money, usually in series of books, not one-offs).
|
| My wife is in marketing for her day job and has been using
| that knowledge to help target and generate interest in her
| books, and it seems to be paying off, as her preorders are
| eclipsing quite a few established authors in the groups she's
| in, and this is her first book.
|
| When she had half the preorders she does now, a friend was
| saying she could probably expect around $2k in sales in her
| first month, judging by the preorder numbers, so by the time
| it releases she might be seeing 2-3x or even more than that.
| corrral wrote:
| > (but they wrote like, six books in a year. You need to
| churn them out quick to make that much money, usually in
| series of books, not one-offs).
|
| It helps that romance novels tend to be _way_ on the short
| side. Self-published can be even shorter than the
| traditionally published stuff--a lot of those authors seem
| to get away with charging $4+ for maybe 70 pages, for each
| entry in their tens-of-books-long series. Much clearer path
| to _some_ reasonable return than writing 350+ page
| thrillers or big ol ' fantasy doorstops.
| ghaff wrote:
| And I'd say that was a pretty _good_ result overall.
|
| For what may be more relatable to many here, publishing a
| technical (or tech-adjacent, i.e. more popular industry takes
| of various kinds) book may be career-enhancing, even
| significantly so, in various ways. But you still will likely
| just make a few $K in direct moneys.I did a book about open
| source history/business models/etc. and it's been good--even
| was asked to do a second edition/done book signings at
| event/etc.--but still only made single-digit thousands of
| dollars directly.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| Appreciate that you probably didn't want to be accused of
| shameless promotion but I'm genuinely interested; what is the
| name of your book?
| ghaff wrote:
| How Open Source Ate Software (from Apress)--think it's on
| Safari.
|
| I've done book signings at Linux Foundation events and it's
| led to me doing a number of internal projects that probably
| wouldn't have happened otherwise.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| I would say you have to be in the top 0.5% to make minimum wage
| as a fiction writer.
|
| If you want to write listicles, sure you don't need as much
| talent and you can make above minimum wage.
| ozim wrote:
| Like all the "jobs" that should be done by people who don't
| need money to sustain themselves so kids of rich parents or
| self made people after they hit it big.
|
| But it goes with all content creators - sports - academia,
| getting PHD or Professor title.
|
| Funny thing is that a lot of people try to become boxers or
| writers, football players as it seems easy to "make it" but I
| don't know if there is "car sports" rags to riches stories, to
| do car sports one has to be quite on the rich side anyway.
|
| But still to go path of Mike Tyson you still have to be .5%
| talent and work ethic and for quite some time getting scraps as
| payments.
| dageshi wrote:
| There are more options than the past depending on genre niche
| and whether you're trying to entertain or write "literary
| works".
|
| For various genres of the fantasy genre there's a fairly well
| trodden road nowadays of going from royalroad.com (with
| patreon) to Kindle/Kindle Unlimited.
|
| royalroad.com lets people build massive followings and then
| translate them into patreon and other monetisation.
|
| The audiences in the litrpg space right now are voracious and
| are fairly forgiving of typo's/grammar so long as they enjoy
| the story.
|
| I'm not sure the same could've been said 10 or even 5 years
| ago. But again it's fairly genre specific.
| diob wrote:
| Yeah, I remember a study they did with music where they
| separated groups and in each group different bands would come
| to dominate based on luck (whoever got momentum first). Wish I
| could find it, it was quite a time ago.
| sammalloy wrote:
| > Yeah, I remember a study they did with music where they
| separated groups and in each group different bands would come
| to dominate based on luck (whoever got momentum first). Wish
| I could find it, it was quite a time ago.
|
| I'm not familiar with that study, and I try to keep up with
| the literature. You might be very interested to read about
| the historical rise of the grunge genre as an example of the
| kind of luck you are talking about. There was definitely a
| magical kind of serendipity at work between all the different
| musicians and bands who were up and coming at the time.
|
| Some of the one on one interviews with the key players are
| amazing. If they didn't pick up a certain phone call or move
| to a specific city or play music with this one person, entire
| careers would never have been made.
| sammalloy wrote:
| > writing has to be among the worst ways to make money
|
| It's being a musician, actually. Most writers have the skills
| to maintain good side gigs of some kind or another. Musicians
| have to dedicate more of their time to musicianship, and often
| end up on the lower side of the pay scale. Sure, there will be
| a few with a profitable clientele paying for private lessons
| and tutoring, but that's far more rare.
| nibbleshifter wrote:
| Most of the musicians I know make the bulk of their music-
| related income from private tutoring, its what funds the rest
| of it. They usually also will have a day job of some sort.
|
| Recording and producing music, making music videos, etc is a
| massive cost center that may or may not break even. Usually
| not.
|
| Playing live gigs is usually a money loser for most - venues
| often have extremely unfavourable terms (especially when
| starting out - a lot of places are pay to play, where you
| have to market and sell the tickets and at best get to keep
| what's left over after venue hire is covered).
|
| The real money is basically in teaching the offspring of
| upper middle class people how to play an instrument.
| sammalloy wrote:
| > The real money is basically in teaching the offspring of
| upper middle class people how to play an instrument.
|
| Agreed, but even then it's bordering on low income. I saw
| an article a while back that claimed some musicians were
| making big money giving lessons online, but I never
| followed up on it. Apparently the really good ones could
| reach a larger pool of more potential students and double
| or triple their income.
| wslh wrote:
| How much do you earn if your short story ends up in a movie?
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