On Writing Short Fiction: Another way I was lucky: for the first thirty-three years of my life, telling short stories with ink on paper was a major American industry. Although I then had a wife and two children, it made good business sense for me to quit my job as a publicity man for General Electric, with health insurance and retirement plan. I could make more money selling stories to The Saturday Evening Post and Collier's, weekly magazines full of ads, which published five short stories and an installment of a cliff-hanging serial in every issue.
Those were just the top-paying buyers of what I could produce. There were so many other magazines hungry for fiction that the market for stories was like a pinball machine. When I mailed off a story to my agent, I could be pretty sure somebody would pay me something for it, even though it might be rejected again and again.
But not long after I moved my family from Schenectady, New York, to Cape Cod, television, a much better buy for advertisers than magazines, made playing short story pinball for a living obsolete.
. . .I still think up short stories from time to time, as though there were money in it. The habit dies hard. There used to be fleeting fame in it, too. Highly literate people once talked enthusiastically to one another about a story by Ray Bradbury or J. D. Salinger or John Cheever or John Collier or John O'Hara or Shirley Jackson or Flannery O'Connor or whomever, which had appeared in a magazine in the past few days.
No more.
----Kurt Vonnegut, TimeQuake