Jason Sandford’s post on Jeff VanderMeer’s blog proves a great jumping-off point for some extremely interesting argument and discussion. Heated and circular as they sometimes get, almost all the comments are worth reading for the breadth and depth of professional opinion they provide.
It was also pretty damn cool to learn VanderMeer earned $10K from short stories this last year, and Rachel Swirsky pulled in $7K. Those are, to my understanding, fairly extreme outliers, even in their own careers–but I could live off that. If anything I think it adds more weight to Scalzi’s overall argument that people wishing to become professional writers have to value their own work as professionals, though VanderMeer makes some interesting points in the comments about the circumstances under which it might be more beneficial to sell a story to a lower-paying market.
I have no analysis to add, but absorbing all those opinions was extremely valuable.
Also cool: someone mentioned M-Brane SF as a non-pro market they’ve got a lot of respect for.
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