Comments on: Living Like Fitzgerald

By: Diana

Diana — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 00:26:30 +0000

I was just thinking that I wish I had such a way with words when I wrote my high school history report on F. Scott in 1980. I got a C. It was pretty lame. Yours would definitely have gotten an A. ^_^

By: Nick Mamatas

Nick Mamatas — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:01:23 +0000

Short story payments have kept pace with inflation. Of course, they’ve also kept pace with circulation!

As far as ol’ Fitzy, could be worse. He could have been Nathanael West.

By: Doug

Doug — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:53:54 +0000

Daryl @17, Our Gracious Host’s addiction is obviously the Internet, but fortunately it’s a career-enhancing one rather than a debilitating one. (Twitter, however…)

By: Karen Wester Newton

Karen Wester Newton — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:18:02 +0000

It seems to me that the difference in income is caused entirely by the reading public. If people no longer buy short fiction in droves, then authors can no longer make a living selling it. Fitzgerald’s short stories may have supported him but they aren’t what has maintained his reputation. The simple fact is that people aren’t reading them anymore.

Which is not to say the short story is dead; it’s rather like the cockroach, which was much bigger in prehistoric times but shrank to survive and is, buy all accounts, doing just fine.

By: Luke

Luke — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 07:58:20 +0000

Damon Runyon, in the 30s, was getting a dollar a word from the Saturday Evening Post and other short story markets; at the same time, he was Hearst’s best paid reporter and he was raking it in with screen plays of some of the most popular movies of his day.

No need for a multiplier to put him in the upper reaches of top-earning writers today.

(This is based on biographies by Jimmy Breslin and Tom Clark.)

By: George William Herbert

George William Herbert — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:17:36 +0000

In terms of authors making mid-6-figures …

Plenty of speculative fiction authors are showing up on the NY Times and other top 10 or top 50 hardcover bestseller lists… They are probably at or above that range in good years.

Terry Pratchett consistently sells about half what JK Rowling does per year – which is pretty darn good numbers, and he’s been doing it for longer.

I believe that Baen’s David Webber and John Ringo are selling in that range, but someone with one of the books statistics publications would do better at this analysis.

By: Larry Steckler

Larry Steckler — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:56:16 +0000

I know from first-hand experience that whenever Hugo Gernsback received a note from an author that mentioned that that author did not get paid for a contribution some time in the past, he would immediately issue a check === and this was in the 1950’s — long after Hugo was out of Sci-Fi Business.

For more information on Hugo Gernsback check out a new biography available on Amazon.

The document was found by me when we closed down Gernsback Publications in 2003. It was an old ms that I edited and produced as a book.

Follow the link and you can go to the book and thanks to Amazon’s “look inside” feature, you can even get an idea of what it covers.

http://www.amazon.com/Hugo-Gernsback-Well-Ahead-Time/dp/1419658573/ref=ed_oe_p

Hope you find it interesting.

For more information feel free to contact me, Larry Steckler, at PoptronixInc@aol.com

By: John Scalzi

John Scalzi — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:41:09 +0000

Fixed the “peace” misspelling.

By: Jaws

Jaws — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:29:22 +0000

One other reason that Mr Scalzi should not attempt to emulate FSG’s life:

That would require putting Krissy in an inpatient mental health facility to parallel Zelda. Not only would that be inappropriate (she’s obviously the saner of the two), she’d resist. Probably with a baseball bat (remember the photo). Which, come to think of it, might actually undermine her claim to sanity…

By: hugh57

hugh57 — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:36:23 +0000

swampmaster: I’m sure he’d given a piece of his mind to a number of folks over the course of his lifetime.