If you can sell at all, $17,000 is not a tough number to reach. It just isn't. We're not talking about replacing a high-paying job with great benefits, and I'm guessing we're not talking about paying off a mortgage, and probably not even a new car. We're talk about just three thousand dollars above minimum wage.
We're talking $327 a week. You don't even have to write novels at all to earn better than this. I can make that much writing short stories, and just about three times that writing articles, and do so without hitting any of the really big markets.
Marion Zimmer Bradley used to say that anyone who could sell one short story to a good magazine could earn a living as a writer. Assuming the writer actually plants his butt in a chair and writes as often as he should, treats writing as a business, and doesn't screw around taking two months to write a short story, or two years to write a novel, there's no reason this isn't true.
"If" bolded for emphasis.
Catching that first rabbit is not easy. Truthfully, I got tired of submitting to magazines because I just could not seem to get my foot in the door. (Granted, I was very picky about where I submitted -- if it didn't pay pro rates, it was off my list.)
And I know I don't suck -- these were the same short stories that I wrote at Clarion West and the one that got me accepted there in the first place. Lots of nice, "what else have you got?" feedback, but no checks. I realized that I had a stronger passion for writing novels and put short stories on the back burner. I've written a new one here and there but haven't submitted much.
Maybe I'm weird, but I don't think two months to write a decent short story is that slow if you have a full time job to deal with besides writing.