Selling your short stories online

So you want to earn a living writing short stories. You enjoy writing them and believe people will enjoy reading them if only you could get them published.  This might seem challenging when everyone is saying that the market for short stories is shrinking.  This may be true for the traditional magazine short stories, though even here there are still opportunities, however have you thought about selling and making your money online?  There are a growing number of online/electronic magazines that will pay for well written short stories that meet their requirements.

There are ezines in many different genres though I have noticed that horror, fantasy and science fiction seems particularly strong at the moment. As with all writing you need to produce work that is of a high quality; do this and you should be able to sell you work somewhere in the world. 

So how much will you earn? Some ezines will pay per word, typically in the region of 1p – 5p.  Some will pay a flat fee for a story.  Always check what rights you are selling as you may want to offer your work for sale elsewhere at a later date.

A real alternative to selling to a magazine or ezine is to produce a book of short stories and then publish this on Amazon Kindle or another ereader.  This way you can earn royalties for every copy sold and potentially increase your income. It would be reasonable to price a collection of ten short stories at between £1.99 and £2.99 (though certainly try a higher figure if you believe your work will sell at a higher price) and, with some promotional activity, achieve sales that will enable you to surpass the £100 - £750 you might earn by selling to a traditional magazine or ezine.

Of course you will have to do your own editing and produce a cover, you could used paid for services for these, but the rewards for your work will be in line with your efforts.

A collection of ten short stories in likely to be in the region of 15,000 - 20,000 words.  My latest book provides techniques for generating ideas for fiction and non-fiction books; it also shows you how to write a 20,000 word book in 30 hours. Have a look and see if the techniques covered could help you write your own collection of short stories and have a book ready for publication. Write it! - how to write your book in 30 hours or less.

Happy writing.