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2) "Online publishing" is an oxymoron; don't do it. If you can't make it in print, you're not yet good enough. Become a better writer, and continue to try to crack the print markets.

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That's what we try to discourage people from doing.

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Few webzines are trying to make enough money to make their efforts financially worthwhile, so they do it for other more noble reasons. In my opinion, if people are doing it for fun or love, or for its own sake, then they lack an important imperative, the need to put beans on the table. That imperative is what made Poe and Dickens, Bierce and Twain as sharp as they were. If you want to be that kind of sharp, forget ezines, you will have to compete somewhere tougher.

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ps: a spacemen astutely mentioned Poe, Dickens, Bierce and Twain all died without leaving an opinion about online publishing. Perhaps we could look at their lives and find examples of non-paying markets they contributed stories to.

Perhaps some quotes instead:

The salary, moreover, did not pay me for the labor which I was forced to bestow. _-- E A Poe on ceasing to write for the Graham's Magazine

Income is the natural and rational gauge and measure of respectability. -- Ambrose Bierce

Write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for. -- Mark Twain, or perhaps his comment: Virtue has never been as respectable as money.

Robert L. Patten tells us in his seminal 1978 Charles Dickens and His Publishers: Of course Dickens wrote for money. He had to. Gissing's New Grub Street provides a grim reminder of the fate reserved for writers who, like Dickens, had no prospect of inheriting or marrying wealth. Dickens's writing was his means of livelihood.

beans on tables

I think what people are objecting to is your non sequitur logic. You first mention online magazines without solvency. You then draw the conclusion that such a need is what made Poe and Dickens write, or for them to be "as sharp as they were." But your assertion really has nothing to do with writers, but publishers. Because many of these online markets DO pay writers, even while not maintaining solvency. At least, they pay the same if not better rates than their print brothers and sisters. Spaceman's claim is that, were Twain still alive, he probably wouldn't care where his check came from -- as long as it came, in the end.

Online publisher = few beans

Print publisher = lottsa beans

The point, in my opinion, has nothing to do with online/hard copy and everything to do with how many beans DO you get?

Rahl: congratulations on your recent sale.
I was not spouting non-sequiturs.

competition = survival of fittest
online mags = little competition

there is a corellation.

If you don't have to write for beans, you are missing an important driving force.

There are other driving forces, sure, but none that will sharpen you up quicker than getting hungry, a truism for which -- I believe -- Twain, Poe, Bierce and Dickens can vouch.

You know Dickens once tried to start a society for Professional writers in order to counterract the 'amateurish' work produced by those writing under the 'protection' of patrons. The society was especially disposed to introduce rates at which professional writers should be paid and standards they should reach. The relevance is that he believed that patronage offered a 'soft' environment for writers and the result was 'amateurish' work. Competition in the commercial world, Dickens was convinced, made a writer more professional.

PS: Elan statements seem to be on my wavelength.

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I doubt any actual facts will convince you otherwise.

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You are right. Facts alone will not convince me. However, those facts logically interpreted may.

PS: I am more inclined to say low-paying and low-competition

I'd really be interested in what data you have that suggests that any of them are low-paying and low-competition.

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Facts alone will not convince me. However, those facts logically interpreted may.

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For what it's worth, I share with you one of my new favorite quotes. I forget who said it, but it was someone recently on CNN:

Maximum returns below:

IGMS: $500 for 8333 words
Strange Horizons: $450 for 9000 words
Chizine: $280 for 4000 words
Apex and Abyss: $75 for 1500 words (but you can submit 10,000 words if you want but the money tops-out at $75)

I can bet you any money that the more they pay the better the standard of submissions they will receive.

BTW:

If IGMS has 7 x $500 articles they will need 1400 subscribers to break even, that is without paying staff.

If Strangehorizons has 5 x $450 articles they are $2250 behind without paying staff, with the disclaimer: Your donations help keep Strange Horizons running, but did you know your shopping does as well? Whenever you purchase a book, movie, or CD at Amazon or Fictionwise using one of our links, they return a percentage to us to support the site. What 'pay per click rate' do they need to recoup $2250?

If Chizine has 5 x $280 articles they are $1400 behind without paying staff and must rely on click through revenue and/or merchandising to fund the whole exercise. Do you know how they fund it? I could not see it? If they fund it through merchandising who are they selling to? The writers?

The ones that survive financially are the ones that can compete, if they constantly lose money and continue to operate they are patrons, usually at the expense of unpaid or underpaid staff.

Someone's getting stiffed.

Analog: $0.06-$0.08/word
Asimov's: couldn't find out with a cursory look
F&SF: $0.06-0.09/word
Realms of Fantasy: $0.05/word

I am not championing online markets, but what you're saying makes no sense at all. You're saying that the pay is what drives quality up. You then showed us how online magazine have similar payscales to print magazines (except for larger stories which are always hard sells anyway). Then you started talking about solvency which, I'm sure anyone can see, has nothing to do with available slots to be published or even competition for those slots. That's not the writer's concern; it's the publisher's.

I mean seriously.

Now, five thousand words at six cents per word is [brings up calculator on screen, puts numbers in] three hundred dollars. It seems a lot. But I might put in weeks / months of mental work and hours of the physical act of typing on those five thousand words...but I can gross more than five times that every pay period at my real-time job, and in relation to *that*, the three hundred dollars is tiny. (I also assume acceptance of what I write---which I'm stil waiting for.)

If you really want to make money writing, don't write fiction.

Dickens didn't start out as a novelist. He started out as a journalist and only drifted away from journalism when his fiction took off.

In other words, he had a day job.

Same with Mark Twain. The equivalent today wouldn't just include journalism, it would include technical writing, copy writing, and writing romance novels.

Actually, I say that tongue-in-cheek, but now that I think about it I seem to remember someone saying that they wrote romance to pay the bills and wrote in other genres for fun. And let's face it, romance does have the greatest demand.

[edited for spelling]

How do I choose my markets? Well, I've been using Duotrope as the initial search mechanism, and then checking out its suggestions to find the best apparent "fit". And what criteria do I use for my Duotrope searching?

Money.

Simple as that. I look for "semi-pro and up" paying markets. I'm not naive enough to expect to make a living from writing, but I am ambitious enough to want to be paid for what I do. I expect paying markets to be (in general) harder to get into, pickier about what they choose, but I don't know what sort of statistics would or would not convince hoptoad that "paying vs non-paying" is a much more meaningful split than "on-line vs print".

Ultimately, I want to be a professional writer. And if a market's going to pay me for my work, I don't much care whether the product is on paper or on a computer screen.

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But I might put in weeks / months of mental work and hours of the physical act of typing on those five thousand words

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To me, if you are putting that much work into a short story, you are probably violating Heinlein's third rule. You are either tinkering too much, or don't have the story thought out well enough to write it. I rarely spend more than two weeks on a 5000-word short story, and that's with less than stellar butt-in-chair time. If you are writing 1000 words per day, then this is a 5-day project fo rfirst draft, and a couple more days to refine it, and another hour or two for market research. Much more than that and you are wasting time that should be used to write a different story.

In either print or online submissions, choose your markets carefully. Generally, the higher paying markets are better but harder to get into. Generally print pays more than Electronic.

Low paying and free markets are not a bad idea. They are a publishing credit. Ideally, you want to make sure that any market you submit to does have standards that would reject anything of even slightly lower quality than your submission.

Never publish anything to your own website unless you have no hopes of ever publishing it. I used to put my unpublishable stories up on my website but took everything off when I realized that I didn't want editors finding evidence of the tripe I could write. I want them to think that everything I write is of submission quality so they open my next submission with at least some hope of finding quality work.

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Truly, I think really the *only* reason I'd want a story published in a mag, whether it be dead-tree or pretty pixels, is for the publishing credit.

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I totally agree. Nobody could possibly do it for the money (not at first), because, well, they'd end up living in an old He-Man lunch box in the middle of an airport runway, that's why.

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Nobody could possibly do it for the money (not at first), because, well, they'd end up living in an old He-Man lunch box in the middle of an airport runway, that's why.

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I don't write just for the money (I've been writing for more than 20 years, and my first submission of any kind was in October last year; my next - six more subs - were in May this year). But I see absolutely no reason why I should not submit my work to markets that pay in preference to markets that don't. If my work isn't good enough, it'll be rejected. If it is, it'll be accepted. And I'll get paid.

I'll feel good about being published. But I'll also feel good about being paid. Is this such a terrible sin?

From my historical readings in the science fiction field, I gather that back in the 1940s, John W. Campbell / "Astounding" was the most important market in the field. But I also gather that, at least from time to time, or from writer to writer, other markets like "Amazing" paid as well if not better. (One cent to one-and-a-half cent a word.) And some writers avoided Campbell / "Astounding" because they found Campbell very hard to please for the financial return.

In the next decade, the 1950s, Horace Gold / "Galaxy," to an extent, supplanted Campbell / "Astounding" as the prime market. But Campbell / "Astounding" continued to pay as well, apparently. (Three to four cents, by now.) There was also competition from Tony Boucher / "Fantasy & Science Fiction" and also a host of others---and some of them paid just as much.

Furthermore, Gold / "Galaxy" was evidently harder to satisfy than Campbell / "Astounding." There are endless accounts of writers whose stories were shredded, emasculated, sloppily edited...even a few classic stories that were outright rejected. I gather that, by the end of Gold's tenure, a lot of writers simply wouldn't submit to "Galaxy," no matter what they might get paid.