Figured some of our members would want to hear this. Effective September 1st, 2019, the minimum per word pay rate for professional short fiction markets to qualify for SFWA membership is rising from 6 cents to 8 cents (in USD). https://www.sfwa.org/2019/01/sfwa-raising-pro-rate-for-short-fiction-to-eight-cents-per-word/ Any stories sold before Sept. 1 at current pro rates will still count toward qualifying for membership. Seems like a good change for short fiction writers, but it's definitely a setback for the markets working to build themselves up to the pro level.
It's still so painfully low! People talk about how hard it is to make a living from writing short fiction, and... yeah. If we took a gross income of $4K as being more-or-less minimum (considering there will be at least some expenses associated with writing and submitting shorts, plus taxes, etc...) that would mean someone would have to sell 50K words of short stories per month just to survive. I know at least some of the story story business plan involves reprints, but still. Yikes.
And even worse, the pro rate markets have super low acceptance rates. Less than 2% for most of them, based on the Submission Grinder. A lot of those places probably aren't keen on publishing the same writers every month either, so that makes things harder still.
