Last month R.T. Lawton did a piece crunching the numbers on his 51
stories in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. I thought it would be
fun to do the same thing with my more modest collection, especially
since "Professor Pie is Going to Die" arrived this week in the
May/June issue. "Pie" is #43 and there is another novella awaiting
publication, so my current total is 44. R.T. made his first sale
to AHMM in 2001. I made mine in 1981 so not only has he sold more but
he did it in a much shorter time. He has made $21,376 while my stories
earned $16,415. His stories average out to 5,065 words while mine come
in at 4,280, with a meridian of 3,400 words. (I tend to write very
short, but a few novellas bump up the mean considerably.) I am
doing far worse than R.T. on percentage of stories sold: 94 rejections
give me a sale percentage of 32%. Under the current editor, Linda
Landrigan, I have been hitting 54.4%, which may have to do with her
preferences but I hope is also because I have improved as a writer. R.T. also has more AHMM reprints to his credit than I do, but that depends on how you calculate them. Here's the easy way to figure mine: Black Cat Weekly : $50 Japanese Mystery magazine: $350 However,
I also self-published a book, Shanks on Crime. I lost a couple of hundred
bucks on it, but then a Japanese publisher bought the rights to translate it
and paid me $3,600. Nine of the fourteen stories were from AHMM so: 3,600
x 9/14 = 2,324. But,
wait! There's more. The book sold well enough in Japan that the
publisher decided to put out a book of my otherwise uncollected stories,
five of which were from AHMM. So: $3,600 x 5/9 = 2,000. Since those books were published they have earned some royalties and the percentage from AHMM stories turns out to be $585. Which brings us to: AHMM: $16,415 Reprints: $400 Japanese books: $4,909 Total: $21,714 That's
for 43 years worth of work. You will notice R.T. is still ahead of me.
He would probably agree that it's a slow way to get rich. But I've
had fun.
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