[ivraatiems]

It's worth noting that Tor's pay for authors is in the absolute top tier. I've had a short story published in a smaller publication, and they paid me $50 total - $25 for the first six months exclusivity, then $25 again for inclusion in an anthology. That is more typical for a starting out author.

OTOH, getting published in Tor at all is a much much bigger achievement - congratulations to the author!

[keyle]

These figures are interesting for me. One day of contracting dwarfs that.

You'd have to be absolutely passionate and have another income to do this, which is a shame. I think every craft should have its place. Clearly the market is terrible for writers; a bit like indie game makers nowadays.

I hope you get a breakthrough though; because if you keep doing this, you're clearly passionate about your craft!

[munificent]

> Clearly the market is terrible for writers; a bit like indie game makers nowadays.

See also: musicians (recording, less so live performance), DJs, photographers, journalists, documentarians, etc.

Essentially any creative pursuit where:

1) Making it carries high prestige and gratification.

2) The product can be reproduced digitally and appreciated by a large audience.

3) Technology to produce it has become cheaper.

The basic market forces are sucking all the money out of it. I think it's good for a society for skilled creative people to be able to spend most of their time on their art instead of having to do it as a side gig. But we don't seem to have an economic system that currently supports it aside from a small number of lucky winners of the zeitgeist lottery.

[corrral]

Graeber asserts in Bullshit Jobs that when this happens—lots of people wanting these kind of creative high-prestige, high-gratification jobs—the upper echelons of the career tend to be captured by, bluntly, trust fund kids, because they're the only ones for whom a career path that involves potentially years or even decades of barely being paid is viable. Ditto editorships at prestigious publications, non-profit work, all that kind of thing.

[majormajor]

Seems like there's certainly a split there. Lots of popular musicians, for instance, from very humble economic backgrounds. Athletes as well - trust fund kids don't seem, as a rule, to be single-mindedly enough focused on sports throughout their entire childhood and adolescence to hit the top tiers.

Maybe the common link between those two, and unlike some other fields, is that the work has to be put in in childhood and adolescense, when "being paid" isn't much of a thing anyway for anyone.

[munificent]

> Lots of popular musicians, for instance, from very humble economic backgrounds.

Lots of musicians from humble backgrounds, but not as many popular ones today as there used to be. A lot of musicians that get big these days often have a narrative around them of coming from limited means (and some actually do) but if you dig, you often find that most had some family connection or something that massively increased the odds of their winning the popularity lottery.

> Athletes as well

Athletes don't quite apply to my model. You might think it's because their primary job is not producing digital media but winning games, but that's not true. Money flows into professional sports in large through people watching games. Sponsorships are very important too, but those trail the athlete's popularity. The athlete is essentially selling some of the popularity they have already garned through media of their games.

I think the main reason there is always a market for young skilled athletes (in sports that are popular to watch) is simply because there is almost no market for watching old games. Unlike novels, music, etc., virtually no one watches older games. So where in other forms of media, you are competing against a constantly growing corpus of existing content, in sports, the content evaporates quite quickly and needs constant refreshing.

(This might suggest that the path to success in other forms of media is by deliberately creating extremely timely content. "Here's a new song about things that happened on July 12, 2022!")

[whiddershins]

He probably has a point, but Graeber also ends up being pretty full of it in most cases.

[foota]

Unfortunately, I think this is somewhat unavoidable, there's only so much time people can spend consuming entertainment, and so the market for it is somewhat fixed. Meanwhile, there are many people willing to produce it.

I don't know if it's possible for writing/entertainment/etc., to be sustainable for a large portion of the population without major economic reform.

[munificent]

> there's only so much time people can spend consuming entertainment, and so the market for it is somewhat fixed.

It's even worse than that, actually. Because existing entertainment can still be consumed long after its produced, and even consumed more than once by the same person. When you write a book today, you aren't just competing with other new novels, you're competing with every novel written all the way back to Robinson Crusoe.

[foota]

True, but there's sufficient distinction between contemporary and classical works that I think the effect may be limited.

[karatinversion]

On the other hand, Spotify’s most streamed song has been Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of you” since October 2017.

[_glass]

I grew up with this assertion. But right now through my spouse and a lot of friends, I see, that you can earn good money by specializing in a not that popular instrument, e.g. piano (!). And then be just advanced+reliable+do the effort of networking. The money is comparable to a software job.

[hackernewds]

As an outsider, these seem like terrible compensation for time esp given the talent it seems necessary to publish here.

[_glass]

That's nothing, I write for academia, and pay for getting published.

[leephillips]

This comment confuses me. Are you saying that their pay is good for established authors, but they pay only a token amount for authors that they classify as “starting out”? Because the rates you quote are abusive. People who accept token payments for work, out of vanity or a false concept of “exposure”, damage the market for those of us who actually need to get paid for our writing. Such people are the pariahs of the freelance world.

[barry-cotter]

> People who accept token payments for work, out of vanity or a false concept of “exposure”, damage the market for those of us who actually need to get paid for our writing. Such people are the pariahs of the freelance world.

If you want to work in an arena where people are happy to do so for free you need to either get used to it or find a way to make competition illegal or very difficult. That way you can make things better for yourself at the expense of the consumer and people wanting to break in who aren’t related to anyone who matters. For an example see the Screen Actors’ Guild or the American Federation of Musicians.

[ghaff]

People have many different reasons for writing. I've actually had this discussion with authors and you seem to be suggesting that people shouldn't be allowed to accept token payments for work if they aren't dependent on it directly as a full-time occupation. Are you going to ban bloggers etc. in general because they dilute the market for writing at sustainable professional rates?

Amateurs (or pros using an activity like writing in support of some other professional activity) make it more difficult for would-be pros--see also photography, people who do open source development on their own time, etc. Too bad.

[leephillips]

There is no suggestion of compulsion in my comment. I’m asking that people stop hurting their fellow authors by participating in a race to the bottom, simply because they’re flattered that a for-profit corporation is willing to take their product for essentially no compensation. This has nothing to do with contributing to open-source software, working for nonprofits for a social good, etc. I do all those things. But if a business or a startup with dollar signs in their eyes wants to consult with me, or publish my work, they’re going to pay. And it’s unethical to give away your work under these circumstances.

Although I have sympathy for libertarian points of view, I think that minimum wage laws are important. Without them, you have a race to the bottom for wages for unskilled labor, resulting in widespread suffering. We don’t have minimum wage laws for writers or freelance programmers, so we have to depend on our personal ethics. Please stop giving away your product.

[SamoyedFurFluff]

I think you’ve got this a bit twisted, particularly with the notion of for-profit organizations taking with no compensation. Speaking strictly in short fiction, frankly, the vast majority of magazines lose money. Of the magazines that don’t lose money, the vast majority of those don’t make enough to earn the producer/editor(s)/first readers/etc. anything resembling minimum wage. The exceptions are a mere handful: the big 3, Tor, Uncanny Magazine, Clarkesworld, maybe Nature’s Futures section.

[leephillips]

Uhh, this thread started with somebody giving their work away to Tor.

[SamoyedFurFluff]

No, the article in question is about a person who was paid over a thousand dollars for their work to be purchased by Tor.

[ghaff]

My career has benefitted in many ways from writing even if not directly in terms if money. It’s not really my issue that I’m competing with others who want to directly monetize.

[hamiltonians]

you mean thousands of dollars?

[f17]

Short stories don't make a lot of money. $100 is a huge accomplishment. The goal is usually to have them spike sales for a novel, but even there (a) it's iffy, and (b) most novels only sell a couple thousand copies.

Writing, unfortunately, remains something you have to get financially comfortable to be able to do... not a way to become financially comfortable. It's surprising that even in 2022 we haven't fixed that.

[corrral]

> It's surprising that even in 2022 we haven't fixed that.

If anything, it's much worse now than in the early 20th century. There were tons of working-class writers making a living at fiction writing, then. Tons as a proportion of the population, relative to today, anyway.

Compared to then, now, nobody reads fiction. Except porn (romance novels & erotica). Only genre that's still kinda, almost doing as well as several genres did back then. Possibly even better.

[majormajor]

In the early 20th century written fiction had far less competition from filmed fiction, televised fiction, audio fiction, and video game fiction.

If looking at the ability to make a living off a creative pursuit we should make sure to account for the broader ways to do that today.

One thing we have done with writing (or music, or even video to some extent) is make it far easier to do as a hobby without it being a day job.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

I wonder if it’s fair to include other fiction media in that comparison. Or even fiction + nonfiction. Specifically, I’m thinking about your comment about how now, nobody reads fiction (relative to then). Should we count consuming books then to books and TV now, since TV wasn’t a thing yet? I wonder how many people make a living working in entertainment media now compared to then.

[shubb]

I read a lot on online fiction platforms - AO3 and Wattpad are popular platforms but I mostly read Royal Road which seeks to copy asian web novel platforms.

Most of the writers are amateurs but they have diverse means of getting paid - some platforms like Wattpad and Webnovel help writers paywall later chapters, some writers do manually with a paid blog. Some ask for donations on kofi or patreon.

The thing is, speaking about someone who is putting in the effort and skill you'd need to publish for $100 in an anthology magazine - I wonder how much a writer like that makes on these platforms. $100 is only 25 five dollar doners. Maybe "1000 fans" is more profitable.

Here is a top writer from Royal Road - you can see they are pulling $1000 a month. This is surely unusual but it isn't bad https://www.patreon.com/MonroeByJahx

[dqpb]

I don't understand why you would sell for that amount.

[ivraatiems]

I wanted my story in print by somebody legit. Writing was not then and is not now my full time career, it's a hobby, but few things have compared to the excitement I felt when I heard I'd be published.

Many writers will advise you that it's ok to let your work go for free, if it'll get you exposure. I made a deal with myself that I'd charge something for it.

[f17]

> I made a deal with myself that I'd charge something for it.

That's smart. It's probably different for short stories, but with novels, "free exposure" is usually problematic unless it's done right. (I'm launching a novel in '23.)

In principle, the ideal price at launch is $0, insofar as you never want price to be an issue for any reader, and you hope to set off an exponential word-of-mouth phenomenon that renders the first few days or weeks of sales irrelevant by comparison. The problem is that, empirically, you don't get the same quality of readers (as measured by likeliness to read, likeliness to finish, likeliness to review, likeliness to write a fair review, and likeliness to write a useful review) with free giveaways as you do when people buy it.

The S-Tier strat might be to give the book away for free while somehow finding a way to command the psychological investment that people would have in a book if they had paid $30 for it.

[ivraatiems]

> The S-Tier strat might be to give the book away for free while somehow finding a way to command the psychological investment that people would have in a book if they had paid $30 for it.

There are authors who have had success with releasing on blogs chapter-a-month style or similar. In my opinion, if the work is good enough to catch people, it'll get engagement even if it's free, if you find an audience. Lots of authors these days also do Kickstarters and other novel fundraising techniques where they fund future work on the back of long-standing, free or nearly free work.

[ghaff]

Because that's the market rate. The alternative is not to sell.

[corrral]

Wait until you see the lit-fic market.

[spoonjim]

To get people to read what you’ve written.

[f17]

You don't do it for the money. You do it for exposure. If you sell a short story that goes viral, you'll probably get a six-figure advance (which is not as much as it sounds like) on your next novel. That said, the odds aren't great; writing is about the worst way to make money imaginable, in part because either there's no barrier to entry (self-publishing) or there are barriers to entry but they're dysfunctional and political (traditional publishing) and no one knows what's seriously good until it's been around for ~20 years.

[ghaff]

"For the exposure" is a dangerous path. That said, there are a ton of ways in which writing, especially non-fiction, can be a loss leader for consulting, a day job, etc. I suppose it sucks a bit for others trying to make that writing their day job but I'm hardly going to campaign for gatekeeping all public authorship to protect those in the club.

[BMc2020]

You don't do it for the money.

*DANGER WILL ROBINSON DANGER*