The financials of a literary fiction writer are strange and pretty bad, so in the interest of transparency and just shedding a little more light on how much you have to pay to make money in this space, my 2022 financials. (This is talking just money I’ve spent or earned on my writing; I’m not counting things like classes here.)
Spent: $800.30
Earned: $1711.97
This year I went after a lot of contests, both for a manuscript and individual stories, and that’s what this looks like. (Without contests, I figure I would have spent about $300 and earned $700.) I’m moderately successful in selling short fiction, but I’m still spending a massive amount of money just to have my fiction considered, and came out in the black only because I won second place in Nimrod’s story contest this year. If I’d landed in third place, this would be a sadder accounting.
So what did I get paid for? $120 was for a story published last year in Story, but the check went on a mysterious adventure through the Columbus postal system and didn’t arrive till 2022. Of the five long stories I’ve published this year, I was paid for three. One of those three payments was a little bit of luck: I wasn’t originally contracted to receive any payment, but the magazine then got a grant and was able to offer $200 after I’d already signed my contract for two contributors copies. (They could have easily not paid me at all, I wouldn’t have known, so this was really nice of them.) One payment was from a genre magazine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, about $350 for an 11,000-word story. Genre magazines are my dream because they usually pay by the word, and don’t charge for submissions. And then there’s the Nimrod story ($1000). I earned $50 on a nonfiction piece for Words and Sports.
I’ve also sold one piece of flash fiction for $100, money that will come in in 2023. Since I’m working on a novel and not submitting much short fiction right now, it’s totally possible that $100 will be my total writing earnings for next year.
(A related but more time-consuming exercise is to break down costs/earnings for an individual story. Sometimes I’ll joke about having spent $3 to “sell” a story for $0, but the truth is that unless I’ve only submitted the story one time, I’ve actually spent much more than $3 trying to place it. For a cheery example we can take the story I sold to Nimrod for $1000. Over its roughly two-year submission lifecycle, I sent this story out 21 times, spending $88. One of the stories I “sold” for contributor’s copies, I had submitted 11 times at a cost of $12 [maybe my ambitions for it were a little lower?].)
This does feel pretty bleak to me because, yeah, I came out having earned money, but it’s so hard to earn any money as a literary fiction writer. As an editor (and as someone who has just talked to lots of other writers), it’s obvious that most writers don’t subscribe to or read the magazines they’re submitting to. In this world, charging $3 for a submission or $20 for a contest entry, or charging nothing but also paying nothing (as we do at The Journal) is pretty much the only way to keep a magazine sort-of-working financially, though it does create this bizarre system where the business is mostly charging writers to have their work read rather than charging readers. It’s probably similar with small press story collections; a lot of my 2022 spending was on submitting my story collection to contests, after a futile year of trying to interest agents in the collection. You have to figure that most of the writers submitting their collections to these contests (I count myself among them) are not also reading the collections published by every press they’re submitting to, and so the contest entry fee is the only financial support they offer to the press. I feel sort of bad for writers, and also sort of bad for the small presses. No one is earning much money, and most writers who are able to get their work out there are able to do so because they have enough money to pay the fees to submit it.