One thing about doing anything for a long time is that it's easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. After over a decade of selling short fiction, I had only the barest sense of how well I'd done overall. In terms of profit, some years had been startlingly successful, where others had been more or less disastrous; there were stories I sold to major markets on the first or second attempt and others, in my opinion no less good, that I eventually had to let go for a few bucks. Really, the only way to make sense from such arbitrary-seeming peaks and troughs, let alone to gain an impression of whether all the effort I'd put into writing and selling short fiction had been warranted, would be with a ton of data and the obsessive-compulsive nature to dig through it.
Wouldn't you know ... I have both of those things! And just recently I also had the time and incentive to sit down and figure out what stories I've sold, for how much and how often, and then to stick all of that information into an easily interrogated spreadsheet that I could prod for some answers.
The main question I was eager to solve was to what extent all those highs and lows had balanced each other out. But before I even began running numbers, I was conscious of a couple of significant distorting factors. I definitely learned to write and sell short fiction the slow, painful way, by spending a long time producing work that wasn't quite up to scratch or else was wildly ill-suited for professional sale, and then refusing to give up on any of it. The upshot was that, in the early years, I ended up getting paid not much at all for a fair proportion of my output, or even giving stories away for free - which, of course, skews the data dramatically. Then, as a wrinkle in the other direction, perhaps the majority of my sales these days are reprints, which means more money for stories I've already sold once (or, increasingly, more than once.) Thanks to Digital Fiction Publishing, I also now have short stories earning royalties; and thanks to both Digital and NewCon, I have further royalties coming in from my short story collection The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories.
Taking all of that into account left me with a few potential numbers. Based on the raw data, my average pay rate for the eighty stories I've had published would be somewhere around three and a quarter cents per word, or just over half of current professional rates. Add in the Sign in the Moonlight royalties and that rises past three and a half cents. Disregard all of those unpaid publications and it nudges up past four cents.
On the one hand, when you consider the hours I've put in - approximately seven trillion by this point - even an average rate of four cents a word would be paltry. On the other, given the extent to which that's being dragged down by those early low-earning sales, it suggests that in fact the stories that have been successful - whether through getting into well-paying markets or reprint sales or royalties or a combination of the three - have down rather more than I'd ever have guessed towards balancing things out.
Though it's tough to draw conclusions that would be useful for anyone but me from a career that's followed no clear trajectory or logic, let's at least try. I already knew that, in the long term, you can routinely make decent money from selling short fiction, and on rare occasions you can make extremely good money; it's also become more and more apparent that, if you're careful with what rights you sell and for how long and if you're aggressive in seeking opportunities, the most successful stories will keep being successful time and again. What my new data adds is a sense that my early misjudgements, or for that matter the occasions that still sometimes happen when I end up letting a story go for less than I'd like because I'm eager to be involved with a particular market or editor, aren't the big deal I've sometimes felt them to be. While of course it would be lovely to have every piece end up with the likes of Clarkesworld or Lightspeed, the impression I have now is that maybe the scatter-shot approach I've taken makes more sense than at times it's felt like it was doing. I've never made things easy for myself by writing in such a variety of genres and styles, but it's reassuring to discover that the results, on average, have been at least a qualified financial success.
Wouldn't you know ... I have both of those things! And just recently I also had the time and incentive to sit down and figure out what stories I've sold, for how much and how often, and then to stick all of that information into an easily interrogated spreadsheet that I could prod for some answers.
The main question I was eager to solve was to what extent all those highs and lows had balanced each other out. But before I even began running numbers, I was conscious of a couple of significant distorting factors. I definitely learned to write and sell short fiction the slow, painful way, by spending a long time producing work that wasn't quite up to scratch or else was wildly ill-suited for professional sale, and then refusing to give up on any of it. The upshot was that, in the early years, I ended up getting paid not much at all for a fair proportion of my output, or even giving stories away for free - which, of course, skews the data dramatically. Then, as a wrinkle in the other direction, perhaps the majority of my sales these days are reprints, which means more money for stories I've already sold once (or, increasingly, more than once.) Thanks to Digital Fiction Publishing, I also now have short stories earning royalties; and thanks to both Digital and NewCon, I have further royalties coming in from my short story collection The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories.
Taking all of that into account left me with a few potential numbers. Based on the raw data, my average pay rate for the eighty stories I've had published would be somewhere around three and a quarter cents per word, or just over half of current professional rates. Add in the Sign in the Moonlight royalties and that rises past three and a half cents. Disregard all of those unpaid publications and it nudges up past four cents.
On the one hand, when you consider the hours I've put in - approximately seven trillion by this point - even an average rate of four cents a word would be paltry. On the other, given the extent to which that's being dragged down by those early low-earning sales, it suggests that in fact the stories that have been successful - whether through getting into well-paying markets or reprint sales or royalties or a combination of the three - have down rather more than I'd ever have guessed towards balancing things out.
Though it's tough to draw conclusions that would be useful for anyone but me from a career that's followed no clear trajectory or logic, let's at least try. I already knew that, in the long term, you can routinely make decent money from selling short fiction, and on rare occasions you can make extremely good money; it's also become more and more apparent that, if you're careful with what rights you sell and for how long and if you're aggressive in seeking opportunities, the most successful stories will keep being successful time and again. What my new data adds is a sense that my early misjudgements, or for that matter the occasions that still sometimes happen when I end up letting a story go for less than I'd like because I'm eager to be involved with a particular market or editor, aren't the big deal I've sometimes felt them to be. While of course it would be lovely to have every piece end up with the likes of Clarkesworld or Lightspeed, the impression I have now is that maybe the scatter-shot approach I've taken makes more sense than at times it's felt like it was doing. I've never made things easy for myself by writing in such a variety of genres and styles, but it's reassuring to discover that the results, on average, have been at least a qualified financial success.
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