How to Earn Money by Writing Short Stories (Explained)
How to earn money by writing short stories? What do you think about it? Keep reading this article, and we have something for you.
Blogging comes first when we talk about making money online. But most blogs are mainly based on niches like health, fitness, online marketing, etc. But these niches need tremendous knowledge and experience, which is impossible for every writer.
What if I say you can still make money with your writing by creating short stories? Yes! Short stories. With this, you can make big bucks for your living.
Let’s look at all the options in this blog post about making money with short stories.
What Exactly Are Short Stories?
A short story is a complete story more concise than the stories published in a novel. These short stories can be easily read and completed within a single sitting.
Short stories focus basically on the incidents that are bigger or smaller. Even more, it tries to evoke strong feelings from its readers. Sometimes short stories might also consist of a few characters in the plot.
Features of a Short Story
It is a short narrative-type story and consists of features and literature tools like exposition, complication, crisis, climax, and resolution. It doesn’t seem necessary that all short stories follow the same patterns.
Due to its shorter length, a short story usually focuses on one plot and one main character (along with a few additional minor characters sometimes). But remember that it has only one central theme, whereas a novel can tackle multiple plots and themes with various main characters.
How Does Writing Short Stories Make Money?
Most websites that publish short stories make money by showing ads to their audience. Also, some may introduce a paid subscription plan for their audience.
It may be seen as some short stories publishing websites selling their own products while some websites earn money by selling eBooks on their website with exclusive short stories that are unavailable.
Most authors write short stories for magazines that publish short stories like Asimov’s, Ellery Queen, and Woman’s World. All of these magazines still pay top dollar for genre stories.
After knowing the basics of short stories, we will explore some of the best ways to earn money. So you can make a better earning for your living. On top of that, most of the author has already made a significant profit from writing short stories.
Before exploring each way, make sure you have at least one or more short story ideas. It must be engaging and entertaining enough to grab the reader’s attention at each point. Your story must have a proper theme, logical characters, a smooth-flowing narrative, etc.
Which Short Stores Can Be Written?
If you are ready to make some money by writing short stories, you should know the possible niches you can perform well. This section will show you some of the popular niches you can consider.
- Parenting
- Disabled children
- Pet owners
- LGBT
- History
- Romance
And so on.
Now, let’s see how to earn money by writing short stories.
How to Earn Money By Writing Short Stories – 6 Ways
If you are in a hurry, here’s the summary. Below, we will be talking about
- Amazon Kindle
- Starting your own blog
- Publishing on Medium
- Publishing on AGNI
- Publishing on Analog
- Publishing on Sun Magazine
Let’s keep a closer look at each method.
Total Time: 15 minutes
Publish Your Short Story eBooks on Amazon.
This can be seen as one of the easiest and quickest ways to make big bucks with your short stories. First, you must write a series of some of the best short stories (approximately 10 short stories per eBook).
After writing short stories, you must create an eBook with some of the best ebook maker software. Once you have completed your eBook writing, hire a proofreader and remove any grammatical or narrative errors from your stories. You can get one from Fiverr.
Now you have a book that is ready to publish. To increase your ebook’s sales on eBook publishing websites, you can design an eye-catchy front cover of your eBook. For this, you can hire a graphic designer from a freelance website.
But remember that you must keep your ebook’s price relevant to your effort and make a better profit with each of your sales. You must look at your competitor’s eBooks and keep your pricing accordingly.
Start Your Short Stories Blog and Monetize It
This is another option to make money online with your short stories. Talking about its advantage, you won’t have to share the profit with third parties.
But (now talking about a hard way to publish short stories to your website), you have to manage all things to get maximum traffic on your website, such as SEO, content marketing, social media management, etc. In return, you will leave with little time to write some of the best short stories for your audience.
You can monetize your short stories publishing website in a variety of ways. For example, you can charge your audience a monthly subscription to offer them an exclusive short story.
Besides the subscription model, you can sell your exclusive short stories as an eBook. You can also place relevant advertisements on your short stories website.
Publish Your Short Stories on Medium
Another best gem for short stories writer. This option can be better if you don’t like the idea of focusing on another skill outside content writing.
On Medium, you are free to write on any topic. However, to increase the chance of more earning and traffic on your content, ensure that it’s engaging and worthy of getting shared.
When paid members read your article, you will get earnings. Furthermore, the medium app is also available on iOS and Android, confirming that you will get the maximum traffic from different digital platforms.
Submit Your Stories To AGNI
This platform can earn with their talent for creative writers who usually publish essays and poetry. Agni is a popular magazine that publishes essays and poetry. The company allows writers to publish their writing in the magazine and get paid for the articles accordingly.
This can also be seen as one of your short stories’ best alternative or additional income sources. Regarding payment details, Agni pays $10 per page for a short story or essay and $20 per page for poetry. Once their in-house content team accepts your article, you can get paid.
Get Your Science Fiction Published on Analog
Analog offers one of the best publishing platforms to submit science fiction stories for all science enthusiasts who want to make money with their short science fiction stories.
But remember that Analog will only accept professional and realistic scientific stories. And you can also submit an illustration with your work, as most writers do, but the illustration should be visually appealing and related to your story. You can submit your work through their online portal.
You will only get paid once your stories get accepted. Analog typically pays 8-10 cents per word for short fiction (up to approximately 20,000 words), 6 cents per word for serials (40,000-80,000 words), 9 cents per word for fact articles, and $1 per line of poetry. Along with words, they also offer to pay $1200 for colored cover art and $125 for black and white cover. If you are an experienced person, you need to try Analog.
Have a Look at the Sun Magazine
It is another magazine famous for publishing a variety of stories and articles. Personal essays, stories, and poetry are included in sun magazine. There is no word limit for writing. However, the magazine hasn’t published anything longer than 7000 words.
To submit your work, visit their online portal and register yourself. Once you get registered, they will provide you with an ID to submit your work to sun magazine online.
Now talking about its payment details for personal essays and fiction stories, sun magazine will pay you within the range of $300 to $2000. For Poetry, you will get paid between $100 to $250.
After the sun magazine team accepts your written content, you will only get paid.
Supply:
- Nil
Tools:
- Nil
Conclusion
This post discussed some of the most common and successful earning models for writing short stories. However, many other options are not addressed in this blog. As a beginner, you can follow our topics here and start making money with short story writing.
As most of those websites already have this exact kind of earning model. You can choose any option to make money online with your short stories.
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Asim Mukhtiar says
Great Idea. It would be more helpful, if you share some insights on the topic on which the short story should be written.
Editorial Team says
Thanks for the suggestion Asim, we’ll include them to the article.