With a sale in recent days to the excellent, criminally under-read Interzone magazine, I’ve hit the small milestone of ten short story sales.
Given I started my writing career with barely a thought for short fiction, ten sales in under 
three years isn’t so bad at all. In fact, aside from the dozen ways writing short fiction has benefitted my writing overall (detailed here) the sales have given me confidence that my work doesn’t suck and I’m not wasting my time.
Novels are the main game. I get this. I’m working on my third, my second is finished but in need of a huge overhaul, my first is doing the rounds.
I get it, but hell, I find myself feeling a touch nostalgic for a time where short stories garnered decent coin.
It almost seems like a fairy tale, once upon a time…
…a career could be sustained on short stories. Once upon a time, in 1948, Dashiell Hammett 
got six cents a word writing short stories for Black Mask magazine. The average family income in 1950 in the US was 3300 dollars, by the way, and the median home price was 7,300 bucks. Sixty thousand short story words a year – which Hammett at the height of his writing career could have pulled off easily – and he’s earning a good wage (he earned more from his novels, though he had a habit of blowing through it on booze, women, and living in expensive hotels).
In 2015, publications certified as ‘professional’ by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) pay… six cents a word. Shorts have gone from career money to pocket change as the world stupefies, as markets fragment, as bourgeois multi-millionaire anarchists and ultra-rich media proprietors extoll the virtues of giving away blood-sweat-and-tears for free, as publishers get squeezed, and as every mother fucker with a keyboard decides they want to be a writer and puts a book out there.
It’d be nice to live in a world were writers were paid, wouldn’t it? Where the hard work and commitment required to competently achieve an Extremely Difficult Thing (write good fiction) was rewarded as much as say, serving coffee or collecting garbage. This is not to diminish coffee servers or garbage collectors – they both do very valuable things for society. Far more 
valuable than, say, lobbyists for fossil fuel companies, or derivative traders, or the people who spend a lifetime coming up with new flavours for Doritos: these people actively subtract from the common social good.
Anyway, lamenting the socio-economic distortion that enables the shills, seat-sniffers, sock-puppets for the 1%, and coke-snorting former jocks to rule the modern world is about as useful as lamenting gravity.
So, back to where I began: I sold ten short stories – fuck yeah. I’m told this is quite an achievement for someone so early in their writing career – so fuck yeah, again.
Yet, aside from the obvious satisfaction this brings, it also brings an increasing awareness of how much further there is to go – agents, books deals, being paid a non-token amount for a novel, all that stuff. Beyond that, even if I do manage to go all that way, I may not end up anywhere. A ‘non-token amount’ might be a few thousand dollars, and for something that took a year or more to write.
I had a discussion on my Facebook page around the collapse in average earnings for authors (the median wage for a professional author in Australia is AUD 6000 a year; in the UK it is 13k pounds – both well below the poverty line). My answer to someone expressing doubts on whether it was even worth finishing a novel was: “Knowing how tough it is, and going ahead and doing it anyway, must surely be the mark of a true writer.” Something which I genuinely believe, I should add.
But shit – it’s pretty bloody-minded, isn’t it? Success in publishing still equates to life below the poverty line.
It’s a paradox: we have so many more people writing so much more fiction (a Good Thing), and yet the brutal economics of the writing life means we may be missing on on the truly great fiction (a Bad Thing). We may be missing out because truly brilliant voices are getting lost in madding crowds of new writers, or aren’t particularly savvy at marketing or 
technology. We may be missing out because the working-class author, or even the lower middle-class author, who forty years ago could make a living from writing genre, simply doesn’t get that chance anymore. I’ve written previously about George R R Martin, a working class boy from New Jersey who’d have a far tougher time making it today than he did in the late 70s.
This time around my thoughts turn to another giant of genre fiction: Stephen King. King was raised by a single mother, under great financial stress, after his father left to buy a pack of cigarettes and never returned. While King managed to get to university, he married very young and had three kids – his first child born when he was 23. He was under severe economic pressure from the get-go.
Stephen King became a high-school teacher, supplementing his meagre income by working at a petrol station. In his own words: “I would teach, and I would come home tired, like I’d been on stage. And then I had to correct papers – more of the same. And there was very little time left for my own work. I can remember thinking, ‘Two or three more years of this and I won’t be able to write at all.’ We were barely making ends meet, living in crappy apartments.”
Now, Stephen King is a talented writing freak, so chances are he would have been published anyway. But as much, and to immediate acclaim?
Sliding doors:
As head of Tor books, Tom Doherty notes, ‘discoverability’ for new authors is a huge problem. Maybe King would have struck it big with his first novel Carrie (which made 500k in 1973, or 2.6 million in today’s dollars), but far more likely it would be lost in the white noise of a thousand slush piles and over a million new novels published, just in the USA, every year. More likely word of mouth would have helped a slow burn of sales for Carrie, but it would never have achieved the instant success of forty years ago.
Would limited success have tipped the balance in favour of Stephen King’s well-documented drug and drinking addictions? If he hadn’t have been able to quit his teaching job straight away, how quick would the next novel have come? Would King, working today, still be able to go on to write 56 novels over a distinguished career, or would the financial demands of supporting three children have curtailed the output?
Recall Stephen King didn’t even believe his own success at the time, and wrote under the name ‘Richard Bachman’ to test whether he could replicate his earlier achievements (he couldn’t, though he was outed too early to test the alter-ego properly).
And shit: I’m no Stephen-fucking-King.
Anyway, these are the unproductive thoughts I bend towards when I have some success. Imagine the miserable prick that I become after a few rejections in a row.
But this lament for gravity is more than just ruminating on all that is lost. It’s a fear that the gains we’ve made in diversity over the past couple of decades may fade away. If the money continues to dry up in the creative arts, all we have left are rich kids, dilettantes, and ruthless self-promoters.
