John August

Follow Up

How much does a short story earn in a magazine?

Follow Up, Genres, QandA, The Variant

questionmarkWould 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](http://johnaugust.com/variant) 7,123-word length.

These are rough and gathered from feedback writers give to [duotrope.com](http://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](http://www.danbaum.com/Nine_Lives/New_Yorker_tweets.html))

* 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.

Welcome, NY Times readers

Follow Up, Projects, The Variant

The NY Times has an article today about [The Variant](http://johnaugust.com/variant), the Kindle, and my [Twitter followers](http://twitter.com/johnaugust).

> Mr. August, who wrote it for possible inclusion in an anthology of work by well-known screenwriters, tested the story with about two dozen of the 6,000 or so people who follow him on Twitter. They persuaded him to change the first sentence, trim some paragraphs and shorten the title from “The Egyptian Variant.”

You can read the whole article [here](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/business/media/01august.html).

One correction: In the interview, I said that I’d earned enough to buy “about four Kindles.” But I misremembered how much they cost: $359.

As of Friday, I’d made enough to buy 2.73 Kindles.

A week of The Variant

Follow Up, Projects, The Variant

My short story [The Variant](http://johnaugust.com/variant) has been on the market for a week. As promised, here’s an update on how the 99-cent experiment has gone.

variant sales table

Short version: I sold more copies than I expected, with fewer technical issues. I had picked the Friday of Memorial Day weekend precisely because I hoped it would be slower-paced, allowing me to fix whatever disasters struck without a crush of weekday traffic. But I could have been more ambitious, and a mid-week launch would have made more sense.

I get 35 cents on each Kindle sale, versus 89 cents on each download.

I’d be less grumbly about Amazon’s 65 percent cut if their reporting were better. Their DTP publisher tells you almost nothing about your sales. It only shows how many total units, with no breakdowns at all — not by day, not by state, nothing. Fortunately, I had embedded my Amazon tracking number in links from my site, so I do know that 458 of my Kindle sales came from people who clicked through from the launch page. That’s only a third of the Kindle sales, so many people were getting it in one of three alternate ways:

* Following a direct link from an outside site, such as [Daring Fireball](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/05/22/the-variant).
* Buying it through Kindle itself, either the device or the iPhone app. ((I have a hunch that a lot of readers tried out the iPhone app for the first time buying the book.))
* Finding the book on the Kindle bestseller list. ((I’ll have more to say about the bestseller list in another post.))

Downloads provide a lot more data. I’ve already written about the [international readers](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/mapping-the-variant), but the numbers also help show the falloff over time. It sold ten times more on the first day than the seventh.

variant downloads chart

(Note: I grabbed data at different times, so this total is 12 units shy of the table above.)

Today’s [NY Times article about The Variant](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/business/media/01august.html?ref=business) may provide a bump, but an esteemed colleague (Ze) cautions that he’s never seen a real spike from stories in traditional media.

At this point, I don’t have any big sense of What It All Means.

It’s a fine number of sales for a short story that would have likely been buried in some specialty magazine. But I’m not sure I can offer any meaningful analysis of the publishing model, partly because I started with a higher profile than many fiction writers might.

Could an established novelist duplicate (or exceed) these results? Probably. Could a talented but unknown upstart? Not as likely.

This kind of self-publishing certainly reduces the barriers, but literary brand recognition is still a huge asset. It is reading, after all. People would rather do almost anything than risk reading something bad. Free previews and a 99-cent price tag help, but the reputation of the author is likely a major factor in deciding to buy.