Eat His Dust, Energizer Bunny!

In celebrating the long career of short-story writer Edward D. Hoch, 76, British mystery anthologist Mike Ashley explains at the Crime Time Web site:

Once upon a time, when there were more pulps than you could click a mouse on, it was probably quite easy to write and sell a thousand stories. There are plenty of authors whose story count exceeds this--Hugh B. Cave, Ray Cummings, Arthur J. Burks, for example--and plenty more authors who would produce that equivalent wordage and shoot way beyond it by producing lead novels for magazines and long-running series--Lester Dent, L. Ron Hubbard, Walter Gibson, Paul Ernst, Norvell Page, Robert J. Hogan, H. Bedford-Jones, Frederick Faust, etc., etc.

But not any more. The near death of the all-fiction magazine and the slightly shaky state of the paperback market means that outlets for short stories are limited and the opportunity to sell regularly to those markets, let alone make a living out of it, is extremely rare. Well, not rare--unique.

I only know of one writer still working today who makes a living almost solely from producing short stories and is still able to sell them regularly to the magazine and anthology markets. As I write Ed Hoch is working on his 909th short story.

Wow! For those of you who’ve never read one of Hoch tales (most recently collected in The Iron Angel, 2003), this means you have a hell of a lot of catching up to do.