Making Money Off Your Short Fiction: Is It Possible?

My short answer to the question posed in the title is: Perhaps. Indeed, we've all heard the repeated mantra that Hollywood agents and literary reps are stalking around for the next best short story idea to option for some later project. But then again - for you comic fans out there - we've also heard about that latest comic that's gone for $1 million, while you're left standing at your garage sale with your long box of 20,000 mid-grade comics that you can barely pawn off for a good steak dinner. The sad fact of the literary market is that unless the self-contained clique of all-knowing gatekeepers (i.e. the publishing industry) have chosen you from out of the gaggle of geese to be prepped, stuffed, and commercially peacocking for the buying masses, you're flat out of luck.
Now, those of you who graduated, perchance, with your newly minted degrees in Creative Writing might still at least be hopeful that your expensively bought education - the one your folks took out the variable rate mortgage for - will at least earn you a dash of sage advice from the "successful" Professor-Writer-In-Residence who is going to tell you exactly how he made it to the "big time" back in 1965 selling an option for the proposal to his one uncredited screenplay, Valley of The Cannibal Queens. Perhaps he might even send you off packing with his noble suggestion to "break in" by submitting your short story to a depressingly low circulation literary periodical - If A Tree Falls In The Forest: The Literary Fiction Quarterly.
But as the years pass, and you see that you've maxed out your credit line buying guides to instruct you on how to to compose The-Cover-Letter-That-Can't-Be-Denied, the art of The-Pitch-That-Can't-Fail, or Story-Ideas-With-Can't-Miss-Subliminal-Commercial-Appeal, you might start to wonder that maybe you've staked your life's dream on a bet for which you just can't cash in.
And yes, you might even go through the usual bleak terminal stages of artistic atrophy: Denial. Rage. Depression. Application To Law School.
As for me, in case you couldn't guess, I consider myself to be on the optimistic side of things. My approach - inspired by the George W. Bush School of Hopeful Presidential Legacies - is that I'm playing for the far-off future generations, when everyone who rejected, ignored, and shunned my literary work will have long since descended to their graves, leaving a shadowy race of cave-dwelling, mucous-swilling Morlocks to truly recognize and validate the genius work I always knew was mine only to claim.
As for the question: Can you make money off your short story? Maybe yes, maybe no. But in the end, what's money? You're a writer, dammit. An artist. Your true job, before you die, is to play it for posterity - and those mucous-swilling Morlocks.

Article Source: http://www.newsarticlessite.com

J. Leland Kupferberg is an owner of, and artistic competitor in, the newly launched website, PatronQuo.com - a site specifically set up to showcase the stories of floundering artists and writers. The idea behind PatronQuo is to attract patron support - otherwise known as Sugar Daddies - for artists posting their short fiction pieces on the site. The appeal to visitors to the site lie in the number of graphs a

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