OTOH, getting published in Tor at all is a much much bigger achievement - congratulations to the author!
You'd have to be absolutely passionate and have another income to do this, which is a shame. I think every craft should have its place. Clearly the market is terrible for writers; a bit like indie game makers nowadays.
I hope you get a breakthrough though; because if you keep doing this, you're clearly passionate about your craft!
See also: musicians (recording, less so live performance), DJs, photographers, journalists, documentarians, etc.
Essentially any creative pursuit where:
1) Making it carries high prestige and gratification.
2) The product can be reproduced digitally and appreciated by a large audience.
3) Technology to produce it has become cheaper.
The basic market forces are sucking all the money out of it. I think it's good for a society for skilled creative people to be able to spend most of their time on their art instead of having to do it as a side gig. But we don't seem to have an economic system that currently supports it aside from a small number of lucky winners of the zeitgeist lottery.
Maybe the common link between those two, and unlike some other fields, is that the work has to be put in in childhood and adolescense, when "being paid" isn't much of a thing anyway for anyone.
Lots of musicians from humble backgrounds, but not as many popular ones today as there used to be. A lot of musicians that get big these days often have a narrative around them of coming from limited means (and some actually do) but if you dig, you often find that most had some family connection or something that massively increased the odds of their winning the popularity lottery.
> Athletes as well
Athletes don't quite apply to my model. You might think it's because their primary job is not producing digital media but winning games, but that's not true. Money flows into professional sports in large through people watching games. Sponsorships are very important too, but those trail the athlete's popularity. The athlete is essentially selling some of the popularity they have already garned through media of their games.
I think the main reason there is always a market for young skilled athletes (in sports that are popular to watch) is simply because there is almost no market for watching old games. Unlike novels, music, etc., virtually no one watches older games. So where in other forms of media, you are competing against a constantly growing corpus of existing content, in sports, the content evaporates quite quickly and needs constant refreshing.
(This might suggest that the path to success in other forms of media is by deliberately creating extremely timely content. "Here's a new song about things that happened on July 12, 2022!")
I don't know if it's possible for writing/entertainment/etc., to be sustainable for a large portion of the population without major economic reform.
It's even worse than that, actually. Because existing entertainment can still be consumed long after its produced, and even consumed more than once by the same person. When you write a book today, you aren't just competing with other new novels, you're competing with every novel written all the way back to Robinson Crusoe.
If you want to work in an arena where people are happy to do so for free you need to either get used to it or find a way to make competition illegal or very difficult. That way you can make things better for yourself at the expense of the consumer and people wanting to break in who aren’t related to anyone who matters. For an example see the Screen Actors’ Guild or the American Federation of Musicians.
Amateurs (or pros using an activity like writing in support of some other professional activity) make it more difficult for would-be pros--see also photography, people who do open source development on their own time, etc. Too bad.
Although I have sympathy for libertarian points of view, I think that minimum wage laws are important. Without them, you have a race to the bottom for wages for unskilled labor, resulting in widespread suffering. We don’t have minimum wage laws for writers or freelance programmers, so we have to depend on our personal ethics. Please stop giving away your product.
Writing, unfortunately, remains something you have to get financially comfortable to be able to do... not a way to become financially comfortable. It's surprising that even in 2022 we haven't fixed that.
If anything, it's much worse now than in the early 20th century. There were tons of working-class writers making a living at fiction writing, then. Tons as a proportion of the population, relative to today, anyway.
Compared to then, now, nobody reads fiction. Except porn (romance novels & erotica). Only genre that's still kinda, almost doing as well as several genres did back then. Possibly even better.
If looking at the ability to make a living off a creative pursuit we should make sure to account for the broader ways to do that today.
One thing we have done with writing (or music, or even video to some extent) is make it far easier to do as a hobby without it being a day job.
Most of the writers are amateurs but they have diverse means of getting paid - some platforms like Wattpad and Webnovel help writers paywall later chapters, some writers do manually with a paid blog. Some ask for donations on kofi or patreon.
The thing is, speaking about someone who is putting in the effort and skill you'd need to publish for $100 in an anthology magazine - I wonder how much a writer like that makes on these platforms. $100 is only 25 five dollar doners. Maybe "1000 fans" is more profitable.
Here is a top writer from Royal Road - you can see they are pulling $1000 a month. This is surely unusual but it isn't bad https://www.patreon.com/MonroeByJahx
Many writers will advise you that it's ok to let your work go for free, if it'll get you exposure. I made a deal with myself that I'd charge something for it.
That's smart. It's probably different for short stories, but with novels, "free exposure" is usually problematic unless it's done right. (I'm launching a novel in '23.)
In principle, the ideal price at launch is $0, insofar as you never want price to be an issue for any reader, and you hope to set off an exponential word-of-mouth phenomenon that renders the first few days or weeks of sales irrelevant by comparison. The problem is that, empirically, you don't get the same quality of readers (as measured by likeliness to read, likeliness to finish, likeliness to review, likeliness to write a fair review, and likeliness to write a useful review) with free giveaways as you do when people buy it.
The S-Tier strat might be to give the book away for free while somehow finding a way to command the psychological investment that people would have in a book if they had paid $30 for it.
There are authors who have had success with releasing on blogs chapter-a-month style or similar. In my opinion, if the work is good enough to catch people, it'll get engagement even if it's free, if you find an audience. Lots of authors these days also do Kickstarters and other novel fundraising techniques where they fund future work on the back of long-standing, free or nearly free work.
*DANGER WILL ROBINSON DANGER*