Every couple of years, I get the short story bug and write maybe half a dozen short stories in the span of just a few months. Then, I get really excited about putting them up on submission, and for the next couple of years I systematically send them out to all the professional markets… and then the semi-professional markets… and then, when only a couple of them actually sell, I self-publish them. My enthusiasm gradually dies down, until I catch the short story bug again, and the cycle repeats.
When I caught the short story bug last year, though, it was immediately after NaNoWriMo, where I wrote 50k words of short stories instead of 50k words of a novel. That was so much fun that I think I’m going to do it every year. In fact, I may try out Camp NaNoWriMo too, just for the fun of it.
But this post isn’t about whether short stories are worth writing. That’s an artistic question, and the answer for most writers is probably some version of “yes, but…” The big question on my mind, however, is whether short stories are worth publishing—that is, are short stories worth it from a career/business perspective?
Several years ago (during one of those times when I’d caught the short story bug again), I wrote a blog post about whether it’s possible to make a living as a short story writer. I speculated that if you spent a year writing two short stories a week, that would give you a hundred stories by the end of the year. Keep it up, and after a few years you would have so many stories that by sheer numbers alone, you could do it.
Dean Wesley Smith came to a similar conclusion back in 2016, and again in 2018. The basic idea is to write like a madman out of hell, keep each one on submission for a couple of years, and self-publish them on a shoestring budget so that even if each one only brings in a few extra dollars, by sheer numbers alone, you make a decent living.
There’s just one problem.
There’s a site called The Submission Grinder that crowdsources writers’ rejection letters and acceptances to produce a lot of useful data on all of the various short story markets. After crunching this data, I discovered there are between 30-50 science fiction and fantasy markets that pay better than 5¢ per word. Most of them are temporarily closed at any given time, and very few of them accept multiple or simultaneous submissions. Furthermore, they all average about 25-30 days to respond to submissions.
What this means is that if you write faster than one short story a month, after only about a dozen stories or so, you will start to run out of available markets. Unless you write under multiple pen names or across multiple genres, you will very quickly develop a backlog of stories that won’t get submitted, simply because there aren’t enough places to submit to. So instead of taking one or two years for each story to work their way through the markets, it will take several more years or perhaps even decades, during which time those stories aren’t making any money for you at all.
As for self-publishing, I am currently experimenting with a lot of different ways to publish short stories, but what I’ve generally found is that short stories can be useful to do just about every other thing except make money selling them directly. If you price the singles at $2.99, you might sell as many as one or two per year, making less than $5. If you price them at 99¢, you may sell as many as a dozen per year, if you’re lucky—again, making less than $5. I didn’t have much luck getting bundles of 3-5 to sell, but larger collections of 10 to 12 stories do occasionally sell, and at a decent enough rate that I’m earning more on those stories than I would if I’d sold them individually as singles. But short story collections don’t sell anywhere near as well as novels.
So if you’re going to publish short stories, the best way to maximize earnings is to submit them to all the professional markets first, and to work your way through those markets as quickly and efficiently as possible. But that requires throttling your output, otherwise you’ll soon end up with a massive backlog of stories waiting for a place to send them. And self-publishing them all isn’t a panacea, because it’s very difficult to make money selling short stories directly. They can be useful for other things, like building your email list, converting readers to fans, and marketing your author brand, but all of this requires making those stories free—at least the singles, if not the collections.
But when you think about it, that makes sense, because most short stories are published for free anyways. When you sell a story to a professional or semi-pro market, it usually ends up on a podcast feed or a website somewhere, available for free in some form. These days, an avid short story reader doesn’t need to spend a dime to find high quality stories produced very well. If they do spend money, it’s usually because they’ve made a conscious choice to support an author, or a magazine, or an anthology that they love.
So is it worth publishing short stories? If you can break into the professional markets, probably yes, otherwise I’m not so sure. And while the best career writing advice is “be prolific,” I do think there’s a point at which the marginal cost vs. marginal benefit of writing another short story really doesn’t make any sense. I suspect that threshold lies somewhere around the point where the submissions backlog starts to build.
I’ll still keep writing short stories, because I do want to crack into those professional markets, and I do think the ancillary benefits of self-publishing short stories makes it worthwhile. But at best, it’s going to be a sideshow compared to everything else I do. Most likely I’ll reserve short stories to NaNoWriMo or Camp NaNoWriMo, and not even bother writing them for the rest of the year.
1 comment