Short stories
Virtuoso said:
I'm curious--are there actually people who make a living solely on short-fiction? How do they survive. Are they incredibly prolific? Or do they engage in criminal activities (grave-robbing, perhaps?) after dark in order to pay the bills? For real, though. Can people really do it?
I don't know any writers who earn a living solely from short fiction, though I have known two or three who could have, depending on what you call a living.
There just aren't very many short story markets these days that pay much. Fifteen years ago, it was at least possible to earn a living writing short fiction, though even then I knew only two writers who actually did so.
Now, I doubt it. You'd have to be very prolific, and you'd have to sell just about everything you wrote.
I won't, however, say it's impossible, just highly unlikely. I think you would have to be able to sell to the top markets, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire, etc., and still sell a bunch of stories to other magazines.
I just don't know. And it really does depend on what you call "a living."
It's a heck of a lot easier to earn a living selling nonfiction. Quite a few writers out there manage that. But short fiction?
Let me put it this way, five or so years ago, when my health was good and I could write as much as I wanted, I was selling short stories regularly, and to some very good markets in the $1,000+ range. I still couldn't earn a living from short fiction alone. Writing short stories full time, selling almost everything I wrote, and hitting several top markets still brought in no more than $22,000. With just a bit of luck, I could have brought this up to $30,000, but in all honesty, your income from writing short stories is going to fluctuate greatly, even if you're both good and fast, and and one year you might bring in $22,000, and the next year only $6,000-7,000, even if you write the same amount of fiction.
And you can hit a slump and bring in almost nothing. The competition is just too keen, and there are only so many markets that pay any amount of money. Even if you are a professional, you can't count on money from short fiction, which means you won't be able to plan a budget around it, even from one week to the next.
Even most selling novelists average only $7,000-$12,000 per year, let alone most selling short story writers.
Unless you can write a novel that hits the bestseller list, at least on the bottom, the way to earn a living from writing is to diversify. You write short stories, you write all sorts of articles, you write a novel, you write recipes, for heaven's sake.
They say it's a hundred times easier to sell an article than it is to sell a short story, and I think this is an underestimate.
I don;t know if any of this helps, but it's a complicated subject. I will say that selling short stories can be a super supplement to your income. It just isn't money you can count on to pay the rent.