![]() ![]() I simply have a Master's Degree in Public Health and worked in various positions including one focused on sexual health before I left the workforce to be a stay-at-home parent. Some can make a living at it and if you have established relationships, that's the ticket.Before we embark on this big essay I want to clarify I am not a doctor or professional anthropologist/sociologist. I find with these types of publications that it takes much more elbow grease to research publications and send and track submissions than it does to write the piece itself. Again a very very competitive market and one in which your idea better be so hot it sizzles when it arrives in the slush heap because glossies publish so frequently. Glossy lifestyle magazines will pay up to $1 a word for non-fiction essays having to do with lifestyle choices, health, relationships, etc. Short fiction is not a way to pay the bills, take it from me. Many literary journals pay with, say, a complimentary copy or three of their publication. Again the writers tend to be literary luminaries, although there is one issue a year devoted to breaking "new" writers (you can't be that new if you get published there). The penultimate place to publish short fiction, the New Yorker, pays $1,000. ![]() Most publications don't pay for short fiction at all, actually. Doesn't mean you shouldn't try but this venue is very high profile and therefore very competitive. Playboy in particular is a very respectable place to have short fiction published but as somebody earlier said, rightly, those published tend to be Norman Mailer, John Updike and the like. I honestly can't recommend you write short stories for any reason but love. But the worst part is, with a short story, when lightning does strike, you still only make about $150. Of course, I've published a handful of short stories and haven't sold a script yet, so maybe you should take that with a grain of salt. ![]() And the available market is horrible - so awful that, in my opinion, it's probably easier to get a screenplay optioned (not made perhaps, but optioned) than it is to publish a short story. It's easy to write one, but much harder to write one that isn't crap. In general though, yes, the short story market sucks. There were all kinds of urban legends circulating about these things, as I recall, and how much you were supposedly paid for them. These stories (and let me emphasize that they were all entirely true in every detail) tended to start with some variation on the phrase, "Dear Penthouse, as a student at a small midwestern liberal arts college, I never imagined anything like this would ever happen to me, but." Apparently this feature became so popular that they got their own spinoff magazine at one point. For a long time, Penthouse (not Playboy) would publish, umm, true reports of erotic exploits submitted by readers. I'm kind of surprised that no one's mentioned the other possibility you might be thinking of. ![]() As is generally the case with Writer's Market, they neglected to mention that Playboy bought those stories from people like Norman Mailer. and the Don Westlake stories)Īs I recall, for years and years, Writer's Market used to list Playboy as paying $2,000 for short stories - which I'm sure guaranteed them a literally endless stream of crap coming over the transom. If I remember correctly, one of the best chances was Woman's World Magazine - they published 3 stories an issue and paid okay. Short stories aren't easy to write, and there's really not that much money in it. I also have hundreds of rejections - many from the nekkid girl mags that first published Stephen King (lots of personal letters from the fiction editor (Maurice DeWalt?) telling me how close I was getting). I had stacks of contrib copies of mystery mags ('zines) and eventually landed one in Mike Shane's MM. Most mags are looking for specific word counts, subject matter, etc. They break it down by genre (and possibly pay vs. If you *do* have a short story (or a file drawer full) WM will list all kinds of magazines where you might send it. You're in competition the the world's best writers. One thing to keep in mind with Playboy - that's a top market. Yeah, you need a copy of WRITER'S MARKETPLACE. ![]()
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