Earning Money Off Your Short Stories: Is It Possible?

My short answer to the question posed here is: Perhaps. Indeed, we've all heard the repeated mantra that Hollywood executives and reps are stalking around for the next best literary property to option for some later project. But then again - for you comic collectors out there - we've also heard about that latest comic that's gone for $1 million, while you're left standing at your garage sale with your long box of 20,000 mid-grade comics that you can barely pawn off for a good steak dinner. The sad fact of the fiction market is that unless the self-contained netowrk of all-knowing gatekeepers (i.e. the publishing industry) have chosen you from out of the hopeful herd to be prepped, stuffed, and commercially peacocking for the buying masses, you're flat out of luck.
Now, those of you who graduated, perchance, with your newly minted degrees in Creative Writing might still at least be hopeful that your expensively bought education - the one your parents took out the variable rate mortgage for - will at least earn you a dash of wise advice from the "successful" Professor-Writer-In-Residence who is going to tell you exactly how he made it to the "big time" back in the 1960s selling the option for the proposal to his one uncredited screenplay, Valley of The Cannibal Queens. Perhaps he might even send you off packing with his noble suggestion to "break in" by submitting your short story to an astonishingly low circulation literary periodical - If A Tree Falls In The Forest: The Literary Fiction Quarterly.
But as time passes, and you see that you've maxed out your credit line purchasing books that instruct you on how to to compose The-Cover-Letter-That-Can't-Be-Denied, the art of The-Pitch-That-Can't-Fail, or Story-Ideas-With-Can't-Miss-Subliminal-Commercial-Appeal, you might start to wonder that perhaps you've staked your life's dreams on a bet you just can't cash in.
And yes, you might even go through the typical bleak terminal stages of artistic atrophy: Denial. Rage. Depression. Application To Law School.
As for me, in case you didn't notice, I consider myself to be on the optimistic side of things. My approach - inspired by the George W. Bush School of Hopeful Presidential Legacies - is that I'm playing for the far-off future generations, when everyone who rejected, ignored, and shunned my artistic output will have long since descended to their graves, leaving a discerning race of cave-dwelling, mucous-swilling Morlocks to truly recognize and validate the genius work I always knew was mine only to claim.
As for the question: Can you make money off your short story? Maybe yes, maybe no. But in the end, what's money? You're a writer, dammit. An artist. Your true job, in the end, is to play it for posterity - and those mucous-swilling Morlocks.

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J. Leland Kupferberg is an owner of, and artistic participant in, the newly launched website, PatronQuo.com - a web site specifically designed to showcase the work of struggling artists and writers. The idea behind PatronQuo is to attract patron support - otherwise known as money - for artists posting their short stories on the site. The appeal to visitors to the site are the number of graphs and performance

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