If you are not a writer, this post will probably be useless to you. But I love data! And Excel! And I saw some other writers make some charts about this on Bluesky, and you know me. I like making a chart.
If you’re not a writer: Short fiction (i.e. flash fiction, short stories, novellas/novelettes) generally pay writers based on cents per word. There are various norms across the genres, but the common wisdom is that the speculative field (sci fi, fantasy, and sometimes horror, depending on who you ask) pays more. The SFWA says a pro rate is 8 cents/word while the HWA consider the pro rate is 5 cents/word.
If you are a writer, but not a speculative writer, you’re probably thinking, holy shit, 8 cents a word??? I will continue to blow your socks off by telling you that there are no submission fees, either. I think that’s pretty neat.
The point of all this data is to see the actual spread of pay rates, both in general and across genres. We writers have a gut feeling about how many markets that pay X are actually out there, but are those feelings true? And what is it really like, on the other side…?
All of this data was pulled from The Submission Grinder‘s advanced fiction search results page. Not every market in the world is in there, of course, but it has pretty good coverage. You’re allowed to filter out various types of markets in your search, and these are the ones that are not included in these results, and why:
- Permanently closed markets (if you’re never going to be able to submit to them, it won’t be too useful. Especially since a fair amount are anthologies which are inherently one-and-done)
- Markets that require a submission fee (because that is a shitty practice imo)
- Markets that force you to subscribe to their newsletter
- Markets with “non-standard contracts”
- Any market that allows AI-generated “writing” (and you all know how I feel about AI)
The rates are for a hypothetical 2,500 word story, which will exclude flash fiction-only markets, and for an original, which are almost always paid higher than reprints. There are going to be anthologies and other soon-to-be-defunct markets in here, along with contests/grants that pay A Lot when you math it out, but the latter gets filtered out of charts, since they’re an outlier adn should not have been counted. Also I did not do every genre available, because that would have taken forever to pull, and I did say this was a quick overview. Also, some markets are in here multiple times. A market that accepts both science fiction and fantasy will have two entries, but it means it’ll be included in each group when we filter by genres.
And if you’d like to follow along, here is my Excel file, and you can see jut how bad I am at naming my sheets.
Also: nothing in here is meant to be judgement about certain genres, markets, pay rates, or writers who choose to submit to them! Don’t use this data to be mean, please.
A Birb’s-Eye View
45% of all the markets are of the “general” variety, which means they don’t really specify what kind of writing they want. And 70% of those are unpaid. For every genre that I looked at, there are more unpaid markets than there are any individual pay band.
But for the speculative (SFFH) genres, there are more total markets that pay in each genre than markets that do not pay.
I told myself this would be “quick” and made a bunch of charts but now I am making even more charts as I realize, hey! This chart would be cool! So here’s a count of all the pay bands by genre. I define the bands as:
- Unapid = 0
- Token = <1
- Semi-Pro = 1-4
- Pro (Non-SFWA) = 5-7
- Pro (SFWA) = 8+
This is also when I started removing the outliers, which are the ones that are 21 c/w+, as each of those only have 1 entry for each.
Fun fact: there is one furry market that is pro-rate, but both the market and the editor are aggressively pro-AI, so it will not be anywhere in this data.
Do y’all like pie?
The only paid band that non-speculative (i.e. general, literary, and furry)(yes I know furry is a weird choice for this thought experiment but this is my report I get to choose the data) that has a higher % than the speculative genres is “Unknown.” Which is the markets that say they pay but don’t tell you what/how much, which is kind of not a cool thing to do.
Time for some cluster bar charts.
The only bar that is above 200 is the unpaid for general, so I manually set the Y axis for all of these charts to stop at 200. But it would look very silly if it ended at 600+ and I believe all charts should have consistent Y axis-es, for ease of reading/shenanigan reducing.
But, man, there sure is a stark difference between the falling curves between spec/non-spec groupings.
Now let’s look at it genre by genre
This will be done in the order that it ended up in my WordPress media library lol. These are stacked bar charts, separating out the markets that are currently open to submissions and those that are closed at the moment. Some markets only open once a year, maybe (including some notable higher-paid ones), while others are open all the time. I wonder if there’s any trends…
You can play “spot the Clarkesworld” with these.
I am really committing to keeping the Y axis the same which is why this chart looks so bad.
There are 325 temporarily closed unpaid markets, btw.
Can you guess who the 11 center is?
SF/F has a bump at the “pro” limit at 8c, but you can see there’s a bump here at the “pro” amount for 5c. But since a lot of SFF places also take horror, you get the 8c bump, too!
I think it’s a real bummer that there are so few paid pure-literary markets out there. And not a whole lot are open, even.
In Conclusion…
There’s a very good chance that I will tweak this and add more stuff lol. I will share this on Bluesky and see what people say and what other data people might want.
But I guess if I had to tl;dr this, it’s: There’s more paying speculative markets than not, and the inverse is true for literary-y genres, but most of those paying markets aren’t paying “pro” rates.
