It's time to take one small step...
How Sci-Fi Shorts Pays Its Writers
We pay our writers every month from the publication's earnings. We believe they are producing the content and deserve a tightly correlated compensation.
At the close of a month, we create a distribution pool from the revenue earned. This pool includes monies from subscriptions, book sales, and any other sources of income, like podcasts.
We divide the pool in half. Fifty-percent goes to pay writers for any content from the month we just closed. And fifty-percent goes to pay for content from the past twelve months.
We believe this model encourages writers to write more frequently for Sci-Fi Shorts, write better quality content for Sci-Fi Shorts, and even help spread the word about Sci-Fi Shorts to potential readers while compensating them fairly over time as the patronage of Sci-Fi Shorts grows.
At the same time, Sci-Fi Shorts gets the opportunity to essentially partner with the writers who’ve joined its writing family and the entire community will flourish. A group of writers can produce more content and bring more readers to the publication in a shorter amount of time than one writer can when working alone.
Although we hope you will regularly submit new stories, there are no quotas or requirements for writers to be considered. Submit as many new, unpublished stories as you like. If we choose to publish your stories, you get paid.
The example that follows should help explain how we pay writers.
Example
Let’s pretend that in June 2022 Sci-Fi Shorts published 30 stories and after expenses created a Distribution Pool of $2000.
Asimov, our fictitious author, wrote 4 of the 30 stories Sci-Fi Shorts published in June. At the end of June, Sci-Fi Shorts computes Asimov’s payment based on the percentage of content he contributed to the publication for June.
Four divided by 30 is 13%. Go Asimov!
Then, Sci-Fi Shorts takes 50% of June’s Distribution Pool, $1000, and gives Asimov 13% of that $1000. Asimov receives $130 for his Sci-Fi Shorts contributed content in June 2022.
Next, Sci-Fi Shorts takes the other 50% of June’s Distribution Pool (again $1000) and pays Asimov for all of his contributed content for the past 12 months (excluding June). During the past 12 months, Asimov has published 42 stories out of the 360 stories published in Sci-Fi Shorts. That means Asimov’s content share is 42 / 360 or 11.7% Asimov’s residual content payment would be $1000 times 11.7% or $117.
Overall, Asimov earned $247 for his content through Sci-Fi Shorts.
You can see how this scales as the Distribution Pool increases and as a writer publishes more content with Sci-Fi Shorts.
If the Distribution Pool had been $20000 instead of $2000, Asimov’s compensation would have been $1300 for June and $1170 for the past year for a total of $2470.
After 12 months, the payments for a piece of content stop. Sci-Fi Shorts is essentially paying you for the exclusive rights to your content for one full year from its publication date. Then you are free to use it however you wish.
It’s simple enough: Each story we accept will earn a flat $10 after the end of the month following publication. Additionally, the best story of any given month, as voted on by our Subscribers, will win a $100 prize. Contest votes will be measured in the amount of Rockets (Likes) each story is awarded. Note that only Subscribers are able to vote, and that they can choose to award more than one Rocket per story. Sci-Fi Shorts is purchasing exclusive publication rights for one year following acceptance and non-exclusive rights thereafter. All payments are made via PayPal.
Get Paid to Write Great Sci-Fi
We believe everyone should benefit as we grow