More Thoughts on Short Fiction

There's a very brief (hoping more people chime in) discussion in Richard Morgan's section of the Night Shade Books board that talks about short fiction. I thought I would post what I said here. First, I'll summarize from Richard his thoughts on the subject.

He compares genre short fiction writers to Pacific Islanders in WWII. White men came in, built airstrips, and planes starting coming. After the war, the white men left, but the islanders continued to work on the airstrips in hopes that the planes would come back. Yes, "if you build it, they will come" type mentality. Richard then says, "I think far too many people in the SF community are cargo culters working off the practices and assumptions of the golden age--at which time, the cargo used to actually show up."

And then I say (after Jeremy Lassen's nice post, and I've revised some grammatical errors in my initial post):

For my money, I'd rather read short fiction over a novel every time. Recently I've found myself unable to read adult novels (young adult novels are fine). Of course, this ties in to the fact that I've been reading short fiction almost exclusively since 2001.

Richard is absolutely correct with people operating on the mindset that publishing is like it was in the Golden Age. And that pertains to novels as well. The midlist for novels used to 100,000 units shipped. That's New York Times bestseller list numbers now. There are more publishers, more writers, etc. The market has changed.

I'd like to posit that it's no more difficult to make a living writing short stories than it is writing novels. Let's do some math. First-time writer gets 5K for novel. It's 90,000 words. That's 5 cents a word. That's the same amount you would make if you sold that text as stories to Analog, F&SF, Asimov's, Fantasy magazine, or Realms of Fantasy. It's actually less money than if you sold to Chizine (7 cents=$6300), Clarkesworld (10 cents=$9000), or the new Tor online community (25 cents=$22,500) to give a few examples.* None of those numbers (except MAYBE the last one) are living wages. And as a new writer I can almost guarantee that you won't earn out your advance to start earning royalties.

Now the thing novels have over short fiction is that being successful, even moderately (or even poorly) successful will lead to more money and more sales with subsequent books. This does not happen with short fiction. Still, it will take a long time, and perhaps never, for most writers to make a living writing. And it's even less likely that you'll make a good living. I don't know Richard's numbers and I don't want him to divulge anything, but it seems that Richard is doing pretty well with his books. But again, that's not typical.

So why write short fiction? Why read short fiction?**

I think there are ideas that are short fiction ideas and ideas that are novel-length ideas. And they are two different skill sets. Again, Richard is correct that you can't learn to write a novel by writing a short story. However, I think something the short story affords you is the ability to try something unusual; i.e., Jeffrey Ford's "The Way He Does It." [full disclosure, I published Jeff's story in my zine Electric Velocipede] For Richard (and I'm putting words in his mouth, so please jump all over me if I'm wrong), he has all these great novel-length ideas, he doesn't have the time or inclination to develop short-fiction ideas. But there are a lot of people (if I can judge by my submission numbers) who have short-fiction ideas, and I think it would be a shame if they had no outlet for it. I think five years from now, maybe ten years from now, you'll see a radically different short fiction market.

As for reading, it's always been the way for me to find new authors. Many of my favorite authors I discovered through short fiction: Jeffrey Ford, Liz Williams, Jeff VanderMeer, Karen Joy Fowler, Joe R. Lansdale, and others. It's rare for me to find a new writer through novels. Perhaps I'm the exception in these matters.
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*I'm focusing on markets that pay professional rates as determined by SFWA. I am not a professional-rate paying market.***

**You could very well ask: Why write novels? Why read novels? Why should I give over my little bit of reading time to a novel when I would be able to read a lot of short stories in that same time and experience a wide myriad of worlds and people instead of spending all my time with one place and one small set of people?

***If anyone wants to send me nice chunks of cash, I would be happy to up my pay rate. Or, you could offer to print the zine for free, that would work, too.