No one should go into writing to get rich, but a little money along the way is nice. Here’s a list of literary journals that pay when they publish your work:
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Pondering self-publication? Here’s a good piece on why one writer decided not to go that direction:
“Many of the writers who have found success in self-publishing are writers of straightforward genre fiction. Amanda Hocking writes young adult fantasy, dwarfs and all. Valerie Forster, who published traditionally before setting out on her own, writes legal thrillers. Romance, too, often does just fine without a publisher. Aside from Anthropology of An American Girl by Hilary Thayer Hamann, I can’t think of another literary novel that enjoyed critical praise and healthy sales when self-published. That’s not to say that it can’t — and shouldn’t — happen, it’s only to point out that it’s a tougher road for writers of certain sorts of stories. Readers like me aren’t seeking out self-published books. Why not? That’s for another essay. (Please, can someone else write that one?) Until the likes of Jeffrey Eugenides and Alice Munro begin publishing their work via CreateSpace, I don’t see the landscape for literary fiction changing anytime soon.”
You may not agree with every point, but they are points worth considering.
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You’ll love Paula Whyman’s story now on Redux; it’s that best combination of funny and poignant. "The Rose Garden" previously appeared in North Dakota Quarterly.
“…Elizabeth rode through the patter of rain, safely dry in the back seat of the cab, and imagined her hosts. “Tim”—the only name the travel agent had provided—would be a tall yet small-boned man in his early sixties with a reddish-gray beard. Nearsighted, he would wear those magnifying half-glasses you could buy in the drug store, because he just didn’t care about fashion. His wife (Mrs. Tim?) would be a heavy-set woman as tall as her husband who spoke only to ask pointed questions. She would dislike women who wore perfume to breakfast. The wife had an eye for artful clutter, but Tim was the better cook.
“The parlor would smell like cinnamon, which Elizabeth liked, or apple spice tea, which she did not. There would be two cats who kept out of sight, except to appear out of nowhere and rub suddenly across the ankles, and she would have to stop herself from shoving them gently away with her instep, instead smiling at her host, commiserating about the foibles of cats.
“The saddest words, what might have been. Who wrote that? She and Cleve had always preferred to sit at their own table for breakfast. But this time was different because she was alone….”