You Can Earn a Full-Time Living Writing Fiction

For several years now, I’ve been earning the majority of my income by writing fiction under a variety of pen names you’ve never heard of. And it isn’t anything special about me. Thousands of authors you’ve never heard of are quietly making a full-time living creating fiction.

True, thousands of others fail. Probably hundreds of thousands. But they don’t fail for thousands of unique reasons. They mostly fail for the same reason people fail in any business — they try to shortcut their way to the money.

I don’t want to call anybody out, so I’ll paraphrase the single most damaging piece of advice I hear repeated to new authors: “The American attention span is dropping. Even a beginner can make a good living by starting with novellas or even short stories. People are looking for shorter reads. You can write your first book in a weekend.”

If you’ve researched self-publishing for a minute, you’ve heard some version of this advice… oh… approximately a zillion times. Fortunately, when I got started back in the wild and woolly days of 2015, I did no research and took no advice. I just plunged in and wrote a 150,000-word novel. Result: I’ve been full-time as an author/self-publisher since I hit publish in 2016.

Let’s hear it from the Grand Master

Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Lawrence Block has been offering this advice for many years:

“[T]he short story is infinitely more difficult to sell than the novel. The market for short fiction was minuscule when I was starting out twenty years ago. Since then it has consistently shrunk…the novel is a much better place for the beginner to get started…”

I’m quoting these words from the 1994 edition of Telling Lies for Fun and Profit: A Manual for Fiction Writers. The copyright is 1981. That’s fairly old advice, you may grumble. Maybe so, but you know what advice is even older, and people still keep quoting it? This chestnut from Ray Bradbury:

“Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.”

With all due respect, Mr. Bradbury published his first short story in 1938. There were dozens of paying markets for science fiction short stories in those days. Most were already gone by 1981. And the money for short stories hasn’t flowed any more freely in the decades since. It may be impossible to write 52 bad stories in a row. But it’s a breeze to write 52 stories in a row that don’t sell for beans.

Ask me how I know

You may wonder why I can feel so confident advising people to start out writing novels. What would have happened if I started out by writing thirty 5,000-word short stories? That’s 150,000 words — same as my novel. How do I know the stories wouldn’t have made more money?

In 2018, curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to do the test. After all, thirty short stories are a lot easier to write. You don’t have to develop even one complex plot. You don’t have to be concerned with continuity over hundreds of pages.

I knew from freelance work I’d done for others that I could easily toss out a finished 5,000-word story every single day. But it was beyond me to produce 5,000 words a day of high-quality, ready-to-publish pages for a novel. I’m closer to 2,000 words a day when it comes to that.

So, thinking life would be easier, I started a pen name that would begin with thirty short stories. I whipped up a bunch of covers. Dropped the stories boom, boom, boom once a day for a month. To make the test fair — well, actually, to make it easier to cross-promote to my existing mailing list — I wrote in the same genre as my debut novel name.

The tale of the tape comes when I pull out the old data for each pen name’s first twelve months of Amazon income.

In its first year, the short story pen name earned a little less than one-third of what the novel pen name earned in its first year. Looked at from the other direction, the novel name earned triple what the short story name earned. Not all 150,000 words are created equal. Writing thirty short stories was nowhere near as valuable to me as writing one novel.

You’re going to find a lot of authors, both self and trad-published, who will tell you the same thing. You probably can’t afford to start out with short fiction. Especially if the lack of sales breaks your heart and spurs you to quit writing altogether.

Attention span studies aren’t about us

Some time ago, a baby author posted in a Facebook group something to the effect of, “Since the American attention span is now eight seconds, don’t you agree we should all be writing novellas?”

No, I don’t agree. I very much don’t agree. Planning a fiction career based on how fast people bounce out of online nonfiction blogs and news articles is completely idiotic.

I lost the link to my response, but the rant went something like this:

“The attention span of American readers isn’t eight seconds. Try eight seasons. In 1920, you could make a living writing short stories. The world has moved on. Television series have taught Americans to dig into complicated plots with plenty of arcs. People want a binge, not a bite.”

Of course, you probably don’t care what I think. What matters to you is what the big names think. Is absolutely massive indie best-seller Amanda M. Lee big enough for you? In late 2019, she posted this comment in a public writer’s forum:

“I had been doing five 30K shorts a year as extra titles but they’re being replaced with two 95K books in a new series instead. Why? Because I bet I make an additional 75K-100K for the year… In my genres, the readers want longer books. That’s what I’m giving to them."

Holy flying bottle rockets, Batman. If my novellas were costing me an estimated 75-100K a year in opportunity costs, I’d quit writing them too. Self-publishing commentator David Gaughran pulls no punches in his online blog page about writing short stories:

“If you are focused more on making a living as a writer, there is one inescapable fact: in almost every genre, it’s much easier to sell full-length books, and far easier again if those books happen to be part of a series.”

The best evidence is to go to Amazon and do a search for the top 50 best sellers in Kindle books. The list changes hourly, but when I did it at the time I wrote this article (spring, 2021), there wasn’t a single short story on the list. A little earlier, there were six of them-- all written by Dean Koontz under contract to Amazon. You’re not him, and neither am I.

A key reason readers prefer longer books and series

If you only read trad books, you may not realize how much work readers go through to find a good indie author. Almost anybody can upload almost anything to Amazon KDP and many other self-publishing platforms — and they usually do. As a reader, every time I look for a new indie author on Amazon, I’m wading through the slush pile. When I do find a keeper, I want to read as much of what they’ve got before I have to hit the bricks in search of somebody else good.

Sure, I read those six Dean Koontz stories. But if I saw six vigilante short stories from an unknown name?

Nah. Probably not.

Why author/publishers prefer longer books or series

You’ve got to promote your books, or nobody will ever find them among the millions of others floating around the ebook sales space. That means you’ll need to buy ads. For many of those ads, you’ll pay a price per click. Thirty-five cents is a bid that will usually get your ad put in front of a decent number of potential buyers.

The problem is, the royalty on a 99-cent short story on Amazon runs around 33 cents. Even if every single person who clicks goes on to buy, you’re losing money on every sale. Eek.

But what if the book is part of a series? Let’s say you’re advertising a full-length novel in a gripping series with five other books already published and ready to buy. If you’ve priced book one as a loss leader at 99 cents, you still lose a couple of pennies every time you sell it. But you don’t care, because the other novels are $4.99.

The royalty on a $4.99 Amazon ebook sold in the US marketplace to a US reader runs around $3.45. In other words, your 35-cent click will often fetch you (0.33x1) + (3.45x5)= $17.58 in royalties.

Yes, I’ve greatly simplified the math. Amazon charges publishers a delivery fee. There are also small costs to producing your book like buying cover art and editing services. Moreover, the royalties are different and sometimes lower depending on where the reader is and what market they buy in. But you get the idea. There’s a way to make money in this business. Pretty good money, sometimes.

The bottom line

Writing short stories is a side hustle. It’s fun, and I write short stories too, but it isn’t my major source of income. Often, I give them away as reader bonuses.

If you take away only one thing from this story, take this: Never assume you’ve failed as a fiction author just because you’ve failed at making much money from your short stories.

Almost nobody (except Dean Koontz!) makes good money from short stories. It isn’t you. It’s market forces. Write a novel. Better, write a trilogy. Best, write a series.

Author Notes

This article was previously published on June 14, 2021, in The Writing Cooperative, a Medium publication. For guidance in writing your series, you should also read my guide to writing pulp novels: