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Comment by oauch | Hacker News Reader

I'd be curious if short fiction writing was more lucrative several decades ago when literary magazines were a larger force. Was it more possible to survive as an independent writer before, or have the economics of writing always been so terrible?

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Short stories used to be the more lucrative form. Writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald made most of their income from selling short stories to magazines like Collier's or Esquire, not novels.

Alexandre Dumas serial published The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo - being paid by the word - which is why they're so long - but also extra impressive how good they turned out.

The stories were not finished while the beginnings were being published.

That's right, I was forgetting serialized novels. They were big, too.

That method of Dumas was how Dostoevsky worked, at least some of the time--not knowing exactly what he was doing in a novel until after its first chapters had already appeared in a magazine. Presumably his gambling debts had something to do with this habit of working, although he supposedly had a case of what they call "hypergraphia," and could produce an incredibly amount of writing in a short amount of time.

In recent years this has changed to screenplays and sites like the blacklist, where every unexperienced writer posts a script for their chance at the megamillions. The reality is that for the most part the site is rigged in favour of those already in the industry and rating are chosen by those with the largest wallets.

You could in the past have made a career writing exclusively short fiction. Over time, however, short fiction became understood as a stepping stone towards novel writing where the "real money" was. However I would never call writing short fiction lucrative in any sense, not even if you're Ted Chiang.

"[Arthur Conan Doyle's] first work featuring Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, A Study in Scarlet, was written in three weeks when he was 27 and was accepted for publication by Ward Lock & Co on 20 November 1886, which gave Doyle £25 (equivalent to £2,900 in 2019) in exchange for all rights to the story."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Conan_Doyle#Literary_ca...

This very good story sold for about 3X the OP's story, at a time when print was the dominant medium.

From what I've read, people did make a living writing short stories at one point. You probably still had to write a LOT.

There were many more pubs to publish to and more people bought short story anthologies.

Back in the pulp era it was common for authors to churn out books under multiple names. There’s definitely a bit of that (including the questionable quality) in the self-publishing market but it’s much less visible.

Things like rent and food were also relatively cheaper back then too.

This is a major factor. Also, day jobs were a lot more chill. Writers still complained about having to go to an office job, but you could use the copious downtime on some of the work. You wouldn't want to do hardcore creative first-draft writing at your office job, but you could edit for typos and do background reading.

These days, so many fascistic surveillance technologies have been deployed to squeeze the downtime out of existence for most jobs. You could have a 1950s day job (well, if you were middle class) and be a writer, but you can't really have a 2020s day job and be a writer, because jobs are so much more stressful.

> but you can't really have a 2020s day job and be a writer, because jobs are so much more stressful.

This is disproven by the large majority of authors having a day job. Most people can’t have a day job and be a writer but the sentence is just as true as “Most people can’t be a writer.”

Rent as a percentage of income is remarkably steady historically because it’s always as high as the market will bear. That’s the rationale behind Georgist Land Value Taxes. You can pay it to the government and the landowner or the landowner, the amount of rent will be the same. Food has gotten cheaper as well as tastier and higher quality over time. The proportion of income spent on food has been dropping for well over 100 years.

> Rent as a percentage of income is remarkably steady historically

https://www.realestatewitch.com/rent-to-income-ratio-2022/

and

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/diff...

and

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/how-ame...

So, depends on what you mean by steady. ~3%-ish growth (at the worst) in my book is not steady.

But yea, totally less expensive and wider availability of high quality food is great to be reminded of, thanks!

It used to be possible to make a living doing nothing but writing for "pulps".

This hasn't been a realistic goal since... IDK, the 50s? 60s?

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