I believe in being open about money; how much you make isn’t a dirty secret, it’s something to share with others so we can know when we aren’t being treated equitably. To that end, I thought I should make a frank blog post about how much money I get for writing.
Video games
The most I’ve ever gotten is $50 for an interactive fiction sold to now-defunct Sub-Q Magazine. All my other games were produced gratis by me for your enjoyment. Tinselfly has its own bank account we put money into to spend on it. Brian puts all the money he made teaching computer game design into it. Mostly we spend small incidentals, like software packages and assets. There was also a thing where we were paying a lot for professional accounting software for a few years to… track how much we were losing. We stopped that. And we spent about seven grand over the years on hiring some artists to work on specific parts. Grand total… oh my. We’ve spent just north of $13,000 making Tinselfly, and it’s not half done. I’m belatedly impressed how much spare money we had for this hobby. I really, really hope we actually finish it.
Poetry
Since 2007, I have sold 42 poems to paying poetry markets. Most poetry markets just pay a token fee, like one dollar. Analog and Asimov’s are my real money-makers, they pay a dollar a line, but then my poems tend to be under ten lines. Just this year I became a Hundredaire! My earnings over 16 years as a professional poet: $100.35. You can probably do the math yourself but my average pay per poem is $2.39. Aaaand I have to say that the most I made on a single poem was $28 – for “We Carry” sold to Analog and a Rhysling Award nominee! (Part of that is the reprint fee for the Rhysling anthology.) So removing that oultier… we’re looking at $1.75 per poem.
(I should point out that I likely missed some payments, and this average could be as high as… um… $3? Unlike with short fiction, I couldn’t go back and check contracts because poetry very rarely sends a contract.)
Why do I insist on only submitting to paying markets if the pay is so little? Well, I want art to be valued, and our culture values nothing so much as money.
Short Stories
Okay, here’s some real meat. Here’s where I actually manage to help my family out. If you want a side hustle that’s more than dying from “exposure,” short stories are where the money is at, but, er… not enough to live on.
Thanks to SFWA, speculative short stories have a standard professional rate. When I started selling stories, this was five cents a word. It’s now eight cents a word. My longest sold short story was 4,900 words long, at eight cents a word that’s $392. The most I have made on a story is $500, that includes an additional reprint payment. (Sometimes you can sell the same story twice, but you get paid less because it’s not new). The least I’ve made on a story is just $18, for a non-pro-rate Canadian-dollar market. My average per short story is $206. This is over 73 short stories I have payment info for (out of 89 sold). Some stories, especially early on, I failed to write down what I was paid, and some are sold but pending payment. (Payment can come quite late in publishing! Up to a year after acceptance!)
My total earnings on short fiction since 2006: $15,476.62
… Do not, and I cannot repeat this enough, give up your day job. Though I will say in the past five years I have averaged $2057 per year, which is nothing to sneeze at. It came in really handy last year when we were in tight financial straights and a $200 check from a publisher meant not putting a bill on the credit card. (Average includes all reprint and translation rights payments, and that one time I sold movie rights to a story for $500.)
Novella and Novelette
These would skew the short story figures, so I separated them out.
“Unlikely Heroines of Callisto Station” my only Novella, earned me $2880! Yes, a whole year’s expected earnings in one fat check! Novellas are where it’s at if you can write them and sell them!
“We Built This City” my only Novelette, earned me $1590.38 – a higher per-word rate than the longer work. Clarkesworld pays nice! This also includes payment for reprinting in China, but does not include the free TRIP to China it earned me, or the money that will be coming from reprinting in the Hugo longlist anthology and year’s best anthology that has already asked for it! Ka-CHING!
WITH the novella and novelette, my total lifetime short fiction earnings are $19,947.07 – which is honestly more than I used to make a year in my 20s, but not what I’d want to live on today. And remember, that’s over seven years, not one.
Still, it should be emphasized – I am very successful as a short story writer. This is top of the biz money.
Novels
Here is where you expect the big bucks, right?
My highest-earning novel was Mega Death, which paid a flat rate of $5,000. Woo!! This paid for the new kitchen floor. Legit big bucks. It was paid in four installments, one quarter on the start of the project, one quarter on first draft, one quarter on completion of edits, and the balance on publication. That was about a one-year timespan.
Next up is Galactic Hellcats. My baby. Long listed by the British Science Fiction Award. Glowing reviews everywhere, including Publisher’s Weekly. Full-page spread in the local paper. Total earnings after two years: $960.02 That includes the $200 advance.
I spent years writing Galactic Hellcats, and most of a year promoting it… a lot more work for less money than a novelette.
I don’t know what to tell ya. A lot of it is just… being a small indy pub. The books are printed through Ingram, a print-on-demand service, and 75% of the cover price goes to them, the remaining 25% split between me and the publisher, and 100% of return cover prices are charged to my publisher? I’m not sure why this works, but it’s something of a monopoly.
Most of my earnings on the book were in the first quarter after launch – my first royalty statement was $585 and I thought “All right! It starts!” But the next one was $95, then $42, and each successive statement has been less than half of the previous. I hoped the audiobook launch would give it a boost, but it did not.
The audiobook itself was a complete loss… the publisher couldn’t afford to make an audiobook, so I paid out of my own pocket, $2400 to produce it. It’s made, as of right now… $6. (Audible takes 75%, too. And only if I promise not to sell the audiobook elsewhere. If I do that, they take a lot more.)
If I include the audiobook finances, Galactic Hellcats has made me … -$1,433.98 … that’s negative… sob.
However, let’s not think about the audio book! Galactic Hellcats is still my number two earner! My third book, The Gods Awoke, has netted me $300 – just the advance. The contract requires the company to make back all their expenses – including returned copies and marketing – before I see a dime, so all I get from them are quarterly statements with negative numbers. And I have absolutely spent more than $300 traveling to book fairs, making book marks, and trying to promote the book. Maybe eventually it’ll break even, but the prognosis is not good right now.
The hope of course is that royalties will continue to trickle in. Maybe I’ll still be making a buck or two a year on these two novels a decade from now, but that’s not going to help with anything beyond my donut habit.
I went with small presses because they were open to me, and I didn’t want to self-publish. I still don’t, and I don’t think I’d have made more money if I had. Well, if I had been able to push Galactic Hellcats like Vernacular Press did, I would have made roughly twice as much money on GH, so let’s say two grand, but I don’t have the ability to tirelessly self-promote that distinguishes the successful self-publisher. I know that. I wouldn’t have even known how to submit the book to Publisher’s Weekly like they did.
And it’s not like I had another option other than small presses. For decades prior to, and continuing after I sold these books, I have been tirelessly querying and submitting to the larger presses. Galactic Hellcats had 46 agent rejections, as well as rejections from every last one of what few traditional publishers accept unagented submissions (Bean, Tor, a few limited windows at big imprints, the “big littles” like Angry Robot and Erewon). I 100% would still be trying to get it bought if I hadn’t accepted Vernacular’s offer. I know, because I’m shopping four novels around right now.
But there you are. If you want to write novels, do not go into it expecting money. If you want money, be a really good novelette writer!
