How much does a short story earn in a magazine?
Would a writer of your stature have made more by publishing The Variant in a literary magazine?
– Brett
I really had no idea what people were getting paid for short stories, so I asked Matt to dig up some numbers based on The Variant’s 7,123-word length.
These are rough and gathered from feedback writers give to duotrope.com and various publication websites. If any short story writers have more firsthand information, please share.
Matt chose a range of literary and genre magazines — but to be honest, I’m not sure The Variant would have found a home in any of them, with or without my name value.
Literary magazines
The New Yorker: $7,500 (estimate based on Dan Baum’s tweets)
Kenyon Review: $356 ($.05 per word)
New England Review: $230 ($10 per page)
Ploughshares: $575 ($25 per page)
Genre magazines
Asimov’s Science Fiction: $427 ($.06 per word)
Strange Horizons: $356 ($.05 per word)
Carve (Raymond Carver): $20-50
Given these numbers, I doubt I would have been better off trying to get The Variant into a printed magazine. It made less than $1,000 in its first week, but it will be available online — and earning money — for at least the next few years. And if a reader likes the short story, it’s much easier to send a link to a friend than a printed story.
Articles
June 1st, 2009 at 6:03 pm
Paying by word is a funny model. It’d make sense if you were the one buying words for advertising and such, but paying FOR words is silly, it encourages the same kind of bloating that makes me hate the arbitrary page requirements of college papers. If you can convey your point effectively and efficiently you should.
June 1st, 2009 at 6:55 pm
I’ve published in Carve. They do not pay for stories. Top tier journals like New Yorker, Atlantic and Harpers pay generously, but if your story isn’t sent through an agent, and if your surname is not Murakami, Updike, Saunders, or Oates, your chances are slim and shit. Short story writers are among the poorest, most slovenly, unsung, unthanked and unpaid bastards in the world of letters. Not counting poets of course. But who counts them anyway.
June 1st, 2009 at 7:13 pm
It doesn’t exactly bode well for the health of the magazine industry, which is already on unsteady ground. Of course, how much an unknown writer could make doing the same thing is the x-factor.
June 1st, 2009 at 7:15 pm
The way I look at it, an author can publish his story semi-instantly through a digital pipeline like the Kindle or a PDF. This provides immediate revenue. So cent-for-cent, the fast turnaround makes digital fiscally better than a literary magazine.
As of now though, digital only seems to work with established writers who have a loyal following. Publishing through a recognized (“legitimate”) source still appears to be a requirement for the rest of us.
Is there a parallel to the movie business? Perhaps even with HDV and YouTube, aspiring filmmakers are better off trying with the studios to build a career. (You can have your own studio once you get to be as big as Spielberg.)
June 1st, 2009 at 8:24 pm
I found this post incredibly valuable. More than you’d think. And the new shopping cart method I might add! I will be using what juice I have to push for kindle from now on – but mainly for this one reason: – I was able to pass out the Variant in PDF form to my sis to read without impediment. That moment signifies something to me. – Kindle implies individual ownership, in the same way that a dongle key implies personal ownership of your Audio-Units plugins.
June 1st, 2009 at 9:26 pm
I’ve been paid .05 a word for stories sold to Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. I suspect mystery authors with name recognition get paid more for their stories, but I don’t have any proof one way or the other. You can be sure I’m being paid the minimum. If you already have a readership and don’t need the exposure that being in a national magazine also “pays” you (as another commenter in a previous post mentioned, I think) then this would appear to be the most profitable way to sell a story.
Your experiment has convinced me to give this a go with a couple of short stories I have in the filing cabinet. I’m interested to see what kind of sales I can generate–if any at all!–without a dedicated core of trufans. In the interest of reciprosity, I shall report back when I have some results. :-)
June 1st, 2009 at 9:28 pm
*”this would appear to be the most profitable way” meaning what you’ve done, not selling to a national magazine.
June 1st, 2009 at 9:48 pm
I phone-dled The Variant tonight. Takes about 4.5 minutes to get from “not even having the app” to actual reading. Like the phone because of the small and the backlight. I tried to pass Variant from one phone to another, = No success. Of course… I barely put 99 cents worth of effort into the attempt. Welcome to the advent of sustainable lit.
June 1st, 2009 at 10:37 pm
If published in a literary magazine wouldn’t your literary agent or manager be entitled to their cut as well? Doesn’t self-publishing also bypass these important relationships?
June 1st, 2009 at 10:41 pm
I’m intrigued by this – because it’s an experiment in something my London based business partner and I have been thinking about.
Hats off to you John for giving it a go. One would hope that all those people who bought via Amazon would come back to you and buy any other short stories you offer up directly rather than paying the 66% of their purchase price to Amazon.
The more I see of this, the more I think we need to get organised and get our platform sorted to allow all writers of short stories a place to sell their short stories – established and emerging writers alike, where the money goes back to them rather than lining the pockets of overbloated and “overpowerful” corporations.
June 2nd, 2009 at 7:33 am
This article helped point out to me just a bit better how a writer could “try” and get paid another way. I don’t have much interest myself in being a short story writer I just used that form over the last few years to help me with my screenwriting, which I think it did.
But honestly I guess I sorta picked one of the worst professions to try and get in, no one really cares about writers unless you’re already recognized. Then the obvious problem, “how to get recognized”, like being a dog and chasing your own tail. I guess I could have just tried to be an engineer, but I’m not complaining really because if I didn’t try and get my stories out from my head I’d proly just go crazy and eat all my shirts, something like that.
Great article John.
June 2nd, 2009 at 8:56 am
It certainly opens up the doorways to “literary singles” that could transform the publishing business in the same way its transformed music.
June 2nd, 2009 at 9:25 am
John,
I’m sure your breakdown of the fees paid to writers is useful to aspiring writers, but it misses the point of short story publishing for the author. Most short story writers don’t publish those stories in order to make money. The short stories are the equivalent of loss leaders for novels and publishing them in magazines — even The New Yorker — are, first and foremost, forms of publicity.
My wife is a literary fiction novelist who has had stories published in several literary journals. Those publishers paid little, but the exposure was critical to her early success. For example, one of the first stories she wrote was published in a well-regarded but low profile journal that paid little. However, that story was selected for the anthology Best American Short Stories (where she has since appeared two more times). That is a huge honor for an up-and-coming author and an accolade that the rest of the literary community notices.
Even when she had a story in The New Yorker last year, she benefited more from the exposure in the form of the magazine’s huge readership, than she did from the money (though that was great, too). The story was an excerpt from a novel that was released about a month after the story appeared and I’m fairly confident that the magazine’s readership gave the book an initial sales bump that it probably wouldn’t have received otherwise.
June 2nd, 2009 at 11:20 am
Paying by the word means that magazines can’t jam words onto a page to change the pay rate. Many (most?) mags are budgeted for words, both in space and dollars. The word is the common unit of measure for both print layout and freelance writing. Typically, nonfiction assignments come with a word count which can be pretty exact. (E.g., 1,200 words; 400 words; 30,000 words) Going over by, in some cases, more than 5% gets your work rejected or you not-hired-again. When stories are clearly padded or stuffed, they are simply not purchased (or not purchased without edits).
On to the real question, the most I have ever been paid for fiction was $0.25/word, for a 2,000-word story published online. They accepted nothing longer than 2,000 words. To be clear, though, Fiction I Have Been Paid For is quite a small sample.
By comparison, a novel can be any length, but advances may or may not have anything to do with length. Consider the 100,000-word novel that gets a (fairly frequent) $10,000-15,000 advance. That’s $0.10-0.15/word against royalties.
Dan Baum’s tweets were a great read, but they demonstrate how The New Yorker and Rolling Stone are not examples that mean a lot to many working freelancers or fiction writers. As John Hodgman once said, we rent our clothes.
The New Yorker doesn’t buy stories, it publishes writers.
June 2nd, 2009 at 3:48 pm
@Chris (Quant):
You actually don’t get the money immediately through Amazon: it’s delayed 60 days. PayPal/e-Junkie is immediate.
@Paul H:
My agent joked about that (getting his commission), but it’s a fair question.
@Leigh:
I was answering question asked. Clearly, literary magazines have long served as calling cards for writers. But my belief is that once upon a time, it was possible to make one’s living as a short story writer. And that doesn’t seem possible with today’s market.
June 2nd, 2009 at 7:45 pm
That’s not a very thorough sampling of “pro” pay rates really. Here is the pay rate (and I’m reasonably sure these go up for “names”) from Jim Baen’s Universe for example:
Jim Baen’s Universe for example pays well.
June 2nd, 2009 at 8:39 pm
For what it’s worth, the tabletop RPG industry usually pays in the .01 to .06/word range but with the added caveat that your work becomes the property of the company you’re working for. Some RPG freelancers just write short articles of a few thousand words that are only published as PDFs available on rpgnow.com or similar sites.
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:29 am
As far as making a living at it, a friend of mine likes to joke that he gets paid roughly the same wage to write about H.P. Lovecraft that Lovecraft himself starved to death writing for in the ’30s. That rate is roughly what much short fiction pays these days.
So, to put it another way, the wage hasn’t increased much, in some sectors, since Robert E. Howard was writing, and food hasn’t gotten cheaper.
I’m surprised to see Universe’s rates are what they are — those are good. Thanks for posting those, Jeanne.