How to Make a Living Writing Short Fiction
by Lucy A. Snyder
This month, I'm shifting away from computer technology and things that go squish in the night. I've decided to take a look at the soft science that creates some hard realities: economics.
Specifically, the economics of trying to make a living writing short fiction. This topic regularly comes up on message boards and at conventions. People usually speak in generalities ("You can't make a living writing stories!" "Can, too!") or cite specific-but-individual anecdotes without other data or analysis.
I'm going to take the approach that it is possible to survive on the proceeds from short fiction; the question then becomes, under what conditions can it be done?
Let's start by looking at the U.S. federal government's standards for poverty. The 2006 US poverty threshold for a single person is $9800, which works out to $817/month. A person earning $6.85/hour – which some rural school districts in Ohio are paying teachers, so it's not just burger wranglers bringing home this kind of paycheck – makes about $890/month after taxes.
As millions of college students know, it's entirely possible to survive on $800 (or even less) each month if you're able to split costs with other people and you can approach your financial situation with some savvy creativity.
Let's assume, for this scenario, that you as a writer are living with a group of other people in a large house. You are not anybody else's dependent for tax or other purposes (meaning your costs are lowered but nobody's there to bail you out if you can't make your share of the rent) and you likewise do not have any dependents (not even a goldfish). You are not trying to pay off loans or other debts. You live in a city and can use a bicycle, public transportation or carpools to get around so that you don't have the expense of maintaining a car. You are willing to shop at thrift stores, get most of your books and CDs from your public library, and you're not above dumpster diving if the situation warrants it.
Furthermore, you are fundamentally healthy, do not have a drug/alcohol habit, and are not accident prone. The budget we're going to work will not support your blowing $60 at the bar every Friday night, nor will it support the kind of health insurance that would actually keep you from going bankrupt should you actually get sick.
Under the above scenario, you could probably rent a room in a shared house in a student neighborhood for about $200 a month. Your share of the utilities might come to $50, your food about $250, your transportation costs perhaps $45, plus $55 for things like aspirin and shampoo and the occasional treat at the neighborhood coffee house.
This means that each and every month, you need at minimum $600 to survive. At $600 per month, you'd be under the federal poverty level and would qualify for food stamps, but getting food stamps as a freelancer is often an unreliable prospect at best so we'll pretend this option doesn't even exist. But be aware that it could be an option, as might other forms of public assistance depending on where you live.
So, we know what you need to make; now let's focus on how you're going to make it.
The SFWA/HWA-designated professional rate for fiction is $0.05 a word. But most markets really don't pay that, and you might not have the luxury of shopping a story around much, so let's go with $0.03/word. At three cents a word, you'd have to sell 20,000 words worth of stories every month at minimum without fail.
Working from the assumption that 30% of your writing has to be rewritten/scrapped or simply doesn't sell for the required amount (and this is a very generous assumption), that output increases to 26000. But if you think about it as having to produce 866 words a day to make your minimum, it doesn't seem that bad; most reasonably proficient writers can crank out a page an hour, so you're looking at less than 4 hours of butt-in-chair work each day.
By a similar calculation, if you wanted to upgrade your lifestyle and make $817/month, you'd have to write 1200 sellable words of fiction each day.
Things get much better if you're able to write children's stories and technical nonfiction. You can get $0.25/word for children's stories from the top markets; a 1,500-word story at that rate gets you $375; sell two of those and you've earned your nut for the month.
Writers with scientific knowledge and good research skills can sell short technical articles for $0.50 or $0.60 a word; a 1400-word article that might take you three solid days to research and write would earn you $800. Sell one of those a month, and the pressure's largely off. Sell two of those, and you're doing better than a 1st-grade teacher's aide in Delaware, OH. You could get a cat! (If your roommates will let you)
Things get even better if your fiction passes as literature in the eyes of the arts community and you can get yourself a grant every once in a while. (Finding and landing grants is a specialized skill in itself, but good first steps are subscribing to Support For Writers and checking with your state and local arts groups).
However, things get considerably worse if you think about how long it takes some publishers to read and respond to your work, and that many fiction markets don't pay until the work is published. If you send a sellable story out to market, it might be over a year before you see a check for it, even if it gets accepted by the very first place you send it to. Having some savings to fall back on becomes very, very important when you think about the dry spells you might encounter.
If you don't have savings, a part-time job that doesn't suck out your soul can help tremendously (The soul-sucking jobs are often well-paid but can cause despair that in turn causes chronic illness and writer's block. It's best to avoid them if you can). Some part-time jobs at colleges and public libraries can come with health insurance benefits; competition for these low-paid jobs can therefore be fierce, but they're worth looking for and applying to. And having a job that doesn't devour your energy but which gets you out of your room (and your own head) a couple of times a week can be a huge mental health boost.
In short, you can survive as a short fiction writer if you're healthy, single, hard-working, prolific, and willing to cut a very low economic profile. A few thousand dollars saved in the bank before you start won't hurt, either.
Preorder a copy of Lucy's upcoming collection - Sparks and Shadows
Lucy A. Snyder has a degree in biology, which she mainly uses to help people cut down on their snack consumption at parties. She's the author of the upcoming collection Sparks and Shadows and her work has appeared in publications such as Strange Horizons, Chiaroscuro, Masques V, and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. You can learn more about her at her website.
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