Thanks for telling me about the Submission Grinder, everyone.
I was messing around on there and I made this little one-minute video with some thoughts:
It's interesting to me that you could potentially make a living writing short stories the same way those old pulp writers made their living. POTENTIALLY, I say. I'm not sure if there's anyone actually doing it today in 2016. But the math, as far as I understand it, is solid.
As far as I'm aware from conversations had with the old timers at the bar in April, the only person who has ever made a living solely from short fiction was Ray Bradbury... which is a pretty high bar 
Golden Pen winner v32 (2016)
As far as I'm aware from conversations had with the old timers at the bar in April, the only person who has ever made a living solely from short fiction was Ray Bradbury... which is a pretty high bar
And even Ray wrote some novels eventually. Plus he was into television and movies and theater...
HM X 3
As far as I'm aware from conversations had with the old timers at the bar in April, the only person who has ever made a living solely from short fiction was Ray Bradbury... which is a pretty high bar
hehe . . . Yeah, probably.
John D. MacDonald used to fill entire issues of pulp mags with his stories under a bunch of different pen names. He may have clawed out a living at the time. I believe that was in the 50s.
Nope, my math is off. Turns out many of those publications only pay five cents per word for flash fiction.
Harlan Ellison is one of the few short story writers I'm aware of who made a go of it besides Bradbury.
He did have his fingers in a lot of other pies though.
On a side note, Otto Penzler put together massive volumes of stories written by these old writers. Pulp collections, Noir collections, Vampire, Zombie, Ghost. . . I have most of them. They're impressive.
[url]
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/s//ref=mw_ ... to+Penzler[/url]
