Is the short story market no longer viable?

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Rechan

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I've seen a lot of information that suggests reader interest in short stories is pretty low. Multiple publishers have told me their anthologies and author collections barely sell. I hear that magazines like Asimov and Analog are suffering.

Is the market drying up to the point that writing short stories is becoming non-viable?

I've been submitting my stories around, and I've noticed that most of the magazines/online sites that accept short stories are either Closed due to an overwhelming slushpile, or they are Open, but the response time has grown more significant due to the slush pile. So it's certainly not a supply issue. My concern is the waning demand.

Ebooks have made novellas more viable, but what about short stories?

Edit: Some have thought that by viable, I mean able to make a living. Perhaps i used the wrong word. By viable, I mean lots of readers reading stories, lots of venues to submit to. Remove money from the equation, is it no longer an avenue for being noticed?
 
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Ken

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Not sure. Suspect so, at least for print publications. Doesn't really matter. If you want to make any real money the top pubs are going to be the ones to get into. And in terms of numbers I (suspect) those haven't changed much, even if they are "suffering." Just do your best and sub. Still money to be made and will be for a long time to come. There will ALWAYS be a demand for good stories to a greater or lesser extent.
 

williemeikle

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I sold 15 short stories at pro-rates last year and I'm on 11 so far this year.

On top of that I've sold two collections to nice genre publishers, and had a dozen more sales at the 3c/word rate.

I can't say that the market isn't viable...
 

nkkingston

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I think it depends on your market. I've heard of people making a living from selling to women's fiction magazines, which pay up to £400 a story, but they're very specific about what they want and like to publish familiar faces. That these markets still exist show there is still a demand, but it's not necessarily a demand for the stories a lot of people are writing.

There'll always be a market for short stories, I think, and a lot of the chat about it waning is due to the failing markets being so much more visible these days. If someone printed up their only little anthology in their local print shop and tried hawking it around town, often it lived and died without making a ripple. Now everything's on Amazon it's easier to see how many just don't sell in big numbers. Plus, the internet makes it a lot easier for people to set up shop as a publisher, thinking it's an easy business, only to be surprised by how little money anyone makes from publishing anything (to make a small fortune, start with a large one...), which means the overall percentage of markets actually worth selling to looks smaller without actually changing size that much.
 

Michael Davis

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Hasn't been my experience. I've got about twenty works published and their split half and half between novels and shorts. Sales are about the same in both categories. For me, after seven years, I just don't worry about royalties like I use to, it's more about writing what I enjoy versus a revenue generator. Course I am retired and need something to do with my time (g).
 

Dennis E. Taylor

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I'd like to try to answer that as a reader. I've been reading SF for about 50 years now. When I started, you could still buy a paperback for less than a buck. I used to buy books a half-dozen at a time, and even more when I was hitting a used-book store. I had no problem buying an anthology, either because it was a series I knew well or because it had one or more stories that sounded interesting.

But now, with prices of books being what they are, I'm a lot more choosy about what I buy. That means not only that I'm less likely to buy an anthology, but also that I'm going to be more careful about picking novels. As an aside, this makes the cover and the jacket blurb that much more important.

Bottom line, IMO the fiction industry is to a certain extent pricing themselves out of the market.

Having said that, e-books do seem to be generally cheaper, and if they can start making x-ray more common, I think it could be the salvation of fiction.
 

Polenth

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It depends what you mean by viable. Are you likely to make a living wage? No. Are you likely to make the same money as the average novelist? No. Novels tend to do better. Can you make some money selling short stories? Yes. This isn't likely to change anytime soon.

If you like writing shorts, and you want to pay a few bills here and there, it's not a bad option. Money from shorts tends to come in faster, so it's what I do when I need money. I've had no luck selling shorts as ebooks (I have a collection and single novelette), but selling to short story markets earns enough to notice.
 

CarbunkleFlux

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I don't really think it's possible to make a living solely on short stories from what I've seen. The process simply takes too long (the lowest turnaround time I've ever gotten is 15 days. Average is a full month.) and for there to even be a shot at returning viable income, you'd need to crank out stories one after the other and have a very low rejection rate.

That is, unless I am mistaken.

It is a valuable and IMO necessary process to accumulate experience, though.
 

Jamesaritchie

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I've seen a lot of information that suggests reader interest in short stories is pretty low. Multiple publishers have told me their anthologies and author collections barely sell. I hear that magazines like Asimov and Analog are suffering.

Is the market drying up to the point that writing short stories is becoming non-viable?

I've been submitting my stories around, and I've noticed that most of the magazines/online sites that accept short stories are either Closed due to an overwhelming slushpile, or they are Open, but the response time has grown more significant due to the slush pile. So it's certainly not a supply issue. My concern is the waning demand.

Ebooks have made novellas more viable, but what about short stories?

The bad news about short stories is that they never have been viable. Short stories have never sold well, particularly in collections or anthologies, magazines have always come and gone, been started and folded, and waning demand has been the case since some cave man first painted a short story on a cave wall.

Then and now, this or that writer would make good money from a collection, and this or that anthology would sell fairly well, but this has never been common. A Stephen King or a Ray Bradbury could pull off fairly large sales, but few otehrs.

Even back when I first started writing more than thirty-five years ago, writers had been complaining for decades about how bad the short story market was, how poor short story sales paid, how many markets had folded, etc. I had a dozen markets fold before any of them could get one of my stories published.

Having said this, no, the market is not drying up any more than it ever was. As always, it is changing constantly, but there are at least as many markets now as there were when I first started writing. Maybe more.

But "viable" is a tricky word. If you mean is there money in short stories, no, not much, at least for all but a very few writers. There hasn't been since the 1940s, and even then only a very, very few writers made much money from short stories.

If, however, you can write well, write fast, and can write in the right areas, some decent money can be made, but you sure won't get rich.
 

Jamesaritchie

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I don't really think it's possible to make a living solely on short stories from what I've seen. The process simply takes too long (the lowest turnaround time I've ever gotten is 15 days. Average is a full month.) and for there to even be a shot at returning viable income, you'd need to crank out stories one after the other and have a very low rejection rate.

That is, unless I am mistaken.

It is a valuable and IMO necessary process to accumulate experience, though.

Turnaround time doesn't matter. Whether it's two days, two months, or two years has nothing to do with how much money you can make selling short stories.

For sales, I've had a turnaround time of an hour, and a turnaround time of just over two years. One is as good as the other. If you're writing and submitting short stories as often as you should be, it isn't long before you pay no attention to turnaround time because you hear back from something every week, or even every day or two.

Ray Bradbury wrote and submitted a short story a week for most of his life, and this really isn't an unrealistic pace.

But earning a living? You'd have to define how much money that is. I've made more from short story sales in a year than some of my working friends live on, but I wouldn't call it earning a living at all. Minimum wage is hardly a living. Even twice minimum wage is pretty skimpy fare.

It may be possible for a very, very few to earn a living selling short stories, if they can write reasonably fast, sell to the right markets, get in anthologies, and convince a decent sized publisher to release a collection.

It sure sounds like a hard way of earning a living, though. If you want money, it's in novels, not short stories.

Nor do I think writing short stories is valuable or necessary, unless you simply love reading and writing short stories. If you want to write novels, forget all about short stories and just write novels.
 

Hapax Legomenon

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I also think that given how well series and remakes sell, I think part of the reason why short stories don't sell is because people prefer the familiar. In short stories, every 3,000 words you're thrown into the unknown and you just kind of have to deal with it.

What may be more "viable" for self-publishing, if you can do it, is to write a bunch of short stories featuring the same characters, setting, etc. It might fulfill the reader's desire for familiarity/stability while still allowing you to write short stories.
 

Jamesaritchie

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I also think that given how well series and remakes sell, I think part of the reason why short stories don't sell is because people prefer the familiar. In short stories, every 3,000 words you're thrown into the unknown and you just kind of have to deal with it.

What may be more "viable" for self-publishing, if you can do it, is to write a bunch of short stories featuring the same characters, setting, etc. It might fulfill the reader's desire for familiarity/stability while still allowing you to write short stories.

You can write short stories, anyway. Self-publishing is always an option, but a very unlikely way to make any money.
 

Phaeal

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If I could get a short into Tor.com every week, I'd make a nice living.

:D

Some people do have a knack for placing consistently with the top-paying pubs. I suspect that initial persistence had a lot to do with it, followed by building on reputation, followed by a talent/inclination for writing the kind of shorts that sell right now, today.

What are those shorts? Read extensively -- you'll see patterns. Whether you can emulate those patterns is another story. So to speak.

I write the shorts I want to write and market them forever. In the mean time -- the long mean time -- I work the day job and write novels.

Write them if you love it. Never stop subbing. Get patient.

Don't forget that day job. ;)
 

Jamesaritchie

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I remember reading somewhere that the last literary writer to make enough money from short stories to be counted as a living was Paul Darcy Boles. Ray Bradbury and Stephen King has both done so in genre fiction.

Ray Bradbury wrote a lot of things besides short stories, but I'd say he's the closest thing we have to a pure short story writer, though, one who made his fame and fortune through short stories.

It would be really interesting to see if a writer who sold nothing buy short stories could make a living at it now. There was a time when I could make $30,000 per year writing short stories. Not a great living, but better than many people live on. Most of those highpaying markets have dried up or cut back now, and I don't know that anything has replaced them.
 

Mark W.

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I think with the advent of e-readers, tablet PCs, and smartphones short stories would be on the rise. However traditionally published paperback shorts and anthologies would be on the wane.
 

Jinsune

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I think with the advent of e-readers, tablet PCs, and smartphones short stories would be on the rise. However traditionally published paperback shorts and anthologies would be on the wane.

I have to agree with you on this for the most part. A lot of short stories are being published by smaller publishers lately for Kindles and stuff like that. With that being the case, there's still traditional, physical print magazines that are publishing short stories. Look at Clarkesworld. Of course, it's mostly established writers who get into that magazine.

I've been told that anthologies and short story collections don't generally sell well and that agents are less likely to take them on unless they're part of a novel series. There's always exceptions to the rules, though.
 

dondomat

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I sold 15 short stories at pro-rates last year and I'm on 11 so far this year.

On top of that I've sold two collections to nice genre publishers, and had a dozen more sales at the 3c/word rate.

I can't say that the market isn't viable...

Everyone is ignoring this answer--too straight, too real, too to-the-point? This happens often in various threads, I've noticed.

It depends what you mean by viable. Are you likely to make a living wage? No. Are you likely to make the same money as the average novelist? No.

The "average novelist" is a poor devil published by a tiny epub or through Amazon and sells 2.5 copies a year. In this sense, even one sale to an unknown anthology that pays $4 and a copy is already more than the "average novelist" makes:)

OK, terminology quibbling over; the short story market stopped being a wage-earning possibility somewhere around the 1940's-1950's, as the paperback novel took over from magazines. However, the bigger your name, the higher the price your stories fetch, and then your short story collections sell almost as well as your novels.

In the last like 70 years, you can make a name for yourself by short fiction, but not make a living only off short fiction.

The long-established short fiction markets are somewhat anal inflexible in what is a good fit for them, while newer markets are more flexible.

If you have a side-gig and write short fiction as a hobby, take 2-3-5 years until you've grasped through trial and error the "house-style" of the established markets, and start making a name through them.

If you don't want to wait (and do not have natural writing inclinations which overlap with the house style of one or more of the established markets), then simply publish your short stuff with new paying markets, before their slush arthritis has set in or their editors in chief develop the obligatory I'm-a-mover-and-shaker-and-defender-of-tru-genre psychosis.

And if, at some point, you do make a name for yourself-- through novels or what have you--then the established short fiction market will suddenly see the light and realize you're a good fit for them after all. Has been known to happen: people submit to say Interzone for a decade with no success, publish a novel with Tor or Ace, submit to the same magazine and suddenly have instant acceptance.
 
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Unhappy

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Not to sell, just to publish

And what about self-publishing a short story (4,000 word) on Amazon?
 

Jinsune

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Unhappy and dondomat have good points. Amazon will allow you to publish short stories, but the thing is, you have to wait for their editors to read through it and determine whether or not they want the work to go up. You can read more about it here.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?&docId=1000700491

I think I've heard of Wool before. Wasn't it picked up by a publisher and turned into a novella?

One thing I'm not too sure about is how a short story could be marketed if the OP does go the Amazon Kindle route.
 

dondomat

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... Most of those highpaying markets have dried up or cut back now, and I don't know that anything has replaced them.

...A list I made of speculative short fic market while back, trying to figure out similar questions.

· [FONT=&quot]Arc – over 5K – $2300[/FONT]
· [FONT=&quot]Tor – 10K – $2500[/FONT]
· [FONT=&quot]Asimov – 15K- $1000 20K - $1400[/FONT]
· [FONT=&quot]Analog - 15K- $1000 20K - $1400[/FONT]
· [FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]http://www.crowdedmagazine.com/guidelines.php[/FONT] 20K - $1000[/FONT]
· [FONT=&quot]Orson Scott - 20K - $1000 [/FONT]
· [FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]http://www.cicadamag.com/node/110[/FONT] 5K, up to 9K, up to 25c (a max of $2250)[/FONT]

· [FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/about/guidelines/[/FONT] 8c 7.5K – $600[/FONT]
· [FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]http://dailysciencefiction.com/submit/story/guidelines[/FONT] (1.5K) 8c $120[/FONT]
· [FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/submissions/[/FONT] (8K) [/FONT]10¢ per word for the first 4000 words, 7¢ for each word over 4000 = $400 + $280 = $680
· [FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]http://www.strangehorizons.com/guidelines/fiction.php[/FONT] (9K) 8c, $720
[/FONT]
· [FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]http://buzzymag.com/submissions/[/FONT] 5c 10K $500 5K is $250[/FONT]
· [FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]http://www.crowdedmagazine.com/guidelines.php[/FONT] 5c 10K $500[/FONT][FONT=&quot]5K[/FONT][FONT=&quot] is $250[/FONT]
· [FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/submissions/[/FONT] 5c under 10K $500 5K is $250[/FONT]
· [FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]http://www.eldritchpress.com/our-world-of-horror.html[/FONT] 5c under 5K around $200[/FONT]
· [FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]http://aresmagazine.com/?page_id=46[/FONT] 5c under 40K best 10K $500[/FONT]
· [FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]http://www.wisdomcriethwithout.com/submission-guidelines/[/FONT] 4K – 6c, serialization works is $240[/FONT]
· [FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]http://www.resurrectionhouse.com/2013/12/call-for-stories/[/FONT] 1-7k, 5C $350[/FONT]
· [FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]http://dreadfulcafe.com/thresholds[/FONT] 1K-7K - $125[/FONT]
· [FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]http://www.inscriptionmagazine.com/submissions/[/FONT] up to 9K 6c $540[/FONT]
· [FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]http://namelessmag.jasunni.com/info/submission-guidelines/[/FONT] up to 9.5K 5c$ 475[/FONT]
· [FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]http://www.wisdomcriethwithout.com/submission-guidelines/[/FONT] 4K 6c is $240[/FONT]
· [FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]http://www.pithypages.com/submissions.html[/FONT] 5K/5c is $250 [/FONT]
· [FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]http://www.grimdarkmagazine.com/submission-guidelines-for-grimdark-magazine/[/FONT] 4K/6c[/FONT]
· [FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]http://triptychtales.net/submissions.html[/FONT] 2-6K $100, weird stuff[/FONT]
· [FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]http://www.spacesuitsandsixguns.com/?p=11[/FONT] 5K 4c $200[/FONT]

So if, in the course of one year, a fella submits 26 short stories/novelettes, all hitting the exact upper limit of the accepted wordcounts, and all accepted by the respective markets, the money made would be around $18.500. The overall amount of words published would be somewhat over 270 00. That's three standard 90 000 novels, or four-five short YA/James Patterson type ones, or one fat thriller/fantasy soap melodrama.

...Having all those upper wordcount limit stories published by all those 26 markets in a year is quite impossible, IMO, unless you're already an established brand (in which case you'd be busy doing other things, unless you take the eccentric step of a short story sabbatical), or an upcoming genius (in which case possibly better to write those normal three or slim five or fat one novels instead).

And what about self-publishing a short story (4,000 word) on Amazon?

In traditional publishing a mini-book about 5K in length would be called a "chapbook"; in contemporary self-pub you're free to do what you want. I've seen 1000 word stories published.
 
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Polenth

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And what about self-publishing a short story (4,000 word) on Amazon?

If you mean is it a good way to make money, not likely for most genres. The exceptions are erotica and romance. Short stories can sell better in those genres for higher prices.

For non-romantic SFF, I've made less per story from the self-published ones than the ones I've sold to markets. It's similar in earnings to selling to a token paying market. The difference is that it might turn around if I got known for some reason (a successful novel, a short nominated for an award, etc), as there's always the potential that a short will suddenly sell. But if I need money, submitting it to markets is the clear winner.
 

Polenth

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Unhappy and dondomat have good points. Amazon will allow you to publish short stories, but the thing is, you have to wait for their editors to read through it and determine whether or not they want the work to go up. You can read more about it here.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?&docId=1000700491

That page is for Kindle Singles, which is not needed to self-publish a short story on their website. It's an optional programme in addition to their usual stuff.

For the usual route, you publish shorts the same way as novels. Just upload it, fill out the details, and off it goes.
 

eyeblink

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I remember reading somewhere that the last literary writer to make enough money from short stories to be counted as a living was Paul Darcy Boles. Ray Bradbury and Stephen King has both done so in genre fiction.

I heard the same about the recently departed Lucius Shepard. But he was very prolific, specialised in long novelettes, novellas and short novels, and sold them to major independents...and often to Ellen Datlow at scifi.com, which paid something like 20 cents a word. In fact, when scifi.com folded, I heard he had to consider going back to writing full-length novels (i.e. 100,000 words plus instead of 40-55,000). He did do journalism as well.

Harlan Ellison's primary output is short fiction, though he did publish some novels in his early career. But the bulk of his income came from scriptwriting and journalism.
 
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