How big is the short fiction market?

There are numbers of publications (google probably can find this ), and here is some data on the percent of stories that are accepted (search black holes), but the data is very incomplete. I have never seen a number for writers of short fiction whoare trying to sell, so I will follow this thread.

These are largely impossible questions t answer with any accuracy without doing hours of research. But the short story market is pretty big. Millions are trying to sell short stories. There is no way of knowing the percentage for your last question, but most, nearly all, short story writers you've actually heard of got their start with paying magazines.

There's no way to accurately measure how many people are writing and submitting short stories. Even submission trackers are only a percentage of people (but we don't know what percentage). Chances are high there are many people submitting shorts who don't sell any or only make token amounts.

I very much doubt that very many short-fiction writers make $5000 a year, and certainly not as an average. There are markets that pay a lot, but they are the ones you will have heard of, like The New Yorker and Playboy (not sure if they are still publishing short fiction), down to those who pay token amounts or copies only.

There are very few people writing full time who do not also write novels and/or screenplays and/or journalism as well as shorts. Lucius Shepard was one of them, but he was a major name, prolific, and specialised in novelettes, novellas and short novels and in the early part of the 2000s was selling many of them to Ellen Datlow at scifi.com, an online market which had a high pay rate (20 cents a word IIRC) during its existence. I did hear that when scifi.com folded, he had to consider writing novels again now that this particularly lucrative market was no more.

I have heard of writers, especially in the romance genre, making a living writing short fiction and serials for women's magazines, but you have to write and sell very prolifically to do that, and that will also depend on your individual circumstances. The one I'm thinking of has a husband who has his own job.

There's little chance of calculating accurate figures.

There are writers who make a living out of short stories. But like all other markets, the majority do not.

Short story collections were once hugely popular and over the last few years the market for short story collections has seen a rise in popularity again -- as far as I can tell this has been mainly amongst smaller publishers.

There are some writers pulling in attractive sums from selling single short stories for $2 or something on Kindle and other e-things. A few have sold thousands globally doing this.

Some peope have questioned the quality of writing made available in such a way -- but that is another subject.

The fact is, yes, you can earn money from short fiction. Almost certainly you won't make enough to live off. But few other writers do anyway.

Jason said:

Here's how I would calculate it. See if you agree:

1. The total publishing industry size in the country is $26 Billion.

2. 43.8% of the industry is fiction (22.9% for Fiction Mystery and 20.9% for Fiction Romance). So 26 Billion*43.8%=$11.39 Billion fiction.

3. Let's say 2% of all fiction is short stories (and 98% novels). Then total short stories would be 11.39*2%=$230 million.

4. Let's say again a short story writer makes on average $5000 per year, that means there are 230 Million/5000=46,000 short story writers in the country?

Sounds about right?

Click to expand...

No, that sounds completely off mark; although it might work in a smaller world with larger differences among markets and activity. A large part of the market for short fiction is non-profit or in the underground economy or just too small to be noticed by people collecting statistics.

I just made a quick search for the number of magazines and found 1700 given on this site http://www.thefastertimes.com/fiction/2010/04/27/a-new-literary-magazine-ranking/ as the number of "literary magazines. I don't know what means, but I would assume that there are at least that many places that publish short fiction.

When I get a chance, I will look up the other factors and see what can be found. I still think that the number of writers of short fiction is indeterminate, because it varies with definition and over time. There are people who write a lot and publish little or nothing, a la Kilgore Trout, and there are others who write a little but publish constantly, but most writers would write sometimes and publish sometimes.

Jason said:

Here's how I would calculate it. See if you agree:

1. The total publishing industry size in the country is $26 Billion.

2. 43.8% of the industry is fiction (22.9% for Fiction Mystery and 20.9% for Fiction Romance). So 26 Billion*43.8%=$11.39 Billion fiction.

3. Let's say 2% of all fiction is short stories (and 98% novels). Then total short stories would be 11.39*2%=$230 million.

4. Let's say again a short story writer makes on average $5000 per year, that means there are 230 Million/5000=46,000 short story writers in the country?

Sounds about right?

Click to expand...

All those numbers are way, way off the mark. All of them. Nor can you calculate how many writers are doing what by using numbers like this, even if you had them all correct.

The truth is, short stories have never been as popular as many believe. There used to be a lot more short story magazines, but most of them paid very little, and such magazines started and folded on a regular basis.

But there is a decent market for certain types of short stories, particularly literary, ASF, and fantasy stories.

As far as I know, there isn't a writer out there who actually make s aliving writing short stories, though, in fairness, part of the reason this is true is because there's more money in novels. If you can write short stories well, the temptation is always to move into the novel market.

This is a good thing for new writers. Editors lose good writers constantly because they stop writing short stories on a regular basis, and spend all their time writing novels, of screenplays, or articles, or you name it.

Most short story markets do not pay very well. Pro rate for SF and fantasy magazine sin only a nickel per word. Several do pay a little more, but it's tough to find genre markets that pay more than a dime per word, and seven to nine cents is more like it. Most literary magazines pay even less.

A few mainstream, literary, and even outdoor magazines, do pay quite a bit. The most I've ever been paid for a short story was $2,000. I'd also sold a fair number at $800-$1,200. But the majority have been in the $250-$400 range.

This doesn't, or course, tell the whole story. One a magazine publishes a story, and once you've used any available paying reprint markets, you can then publish the story on Kindle or other such sources.

But there is no market with competition as stiff as the short story market, unless it's the screenplay market. There are millions and millions of would be short story writers, and you competition at any decent paying market includes the best and most successful short story writers the world has to offer.

Averages really have no meaning, and I wish people would stop using them, but I can guarantee the average short story writer makes nowhere near five thousand per year. The vast majority of short story writer make nothing, and even most selling short story writers earn, if they're lucky, a few hundred dollars per year.

The Kindle route isn't any better. I know one BIG NAME mystery writer who told me he's lucky if a story earns more than two or three hundred dollars, or if a collection ever reaches the thousand dollar mark.

If you want to make any money from short stories, you have to be very, very good at writing them, you must know the markets, and you must be prolific. You can't take several weeks, or even months, writing a short story, and still expect to make any money. Or even to write well enough to sell them at all.

In fairness, if you're good enough to it the top market in your genre or three, and if you can write good stories pretty darned fast, it is possible to make a decent amount of money. I know from experience that I can, if I devote myself only to short stories, earn close to thirty thousand in a year. But even by selling to all the top markets that I have sold to, I still have to sell a bunch of $250-$350 stories, and the last year I actually write short stories full-time, I was writing and submitting a story per week.

I don't think any genre writer is going to make this kind of money selling short stories. Nor, I think, would any literary writer. Even earning five thousand per year in genre writing would mean selling more than fifty thousand words of fiction to the best genre markets out there.

I believe writers should only write short stories because they love reading and writing short stories. Very few will ever make any money by writing short stories, and even if you can sell most of what you write, I doubt you'll ever hit anywhere close to five thousand dollars by writing genre or literary fiction.