Comments on: Attention Spans are Not the Problem

By: Rayme

Rayme — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 17:55:31 +0000

Have to weigh in and say that The Boat bored me silly (or unsilly, perhaps?) while I was caught up in Twilight like nothing in a long time (despite the poor quality of writing/editing I read it with abandon). I’m not saying that The Boat deserves its small audience and Twilight its obese one, but the spark of imagination on every page without knowing winks, should not be mutually exclusive from Great Literature in my mind. We can do better, people (and by people I mean writers, readers and editors, especially editors)!

Something that’s been bothering me as a submitting writer of short stories is the amount of journals and zines that look for fiction under 1000 words, sometimes even under 500. Why are these flash fiction submittals so popular? Can it be only that they want to pack as many authors in, in as few pages/screens as possible?

An over concentration on short-shorts seems a more reprehensible trend than not properly marketing something like The Boat.

By: Seth Fischer

Seth Fischer — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 19:11:50 +0000

Hi Maida,

Thanks for your comments! I agree it is a chicken and egg question, and it drives me crazy when marketers try to pretend like the product, in this case the short story, is the only thing that drives what people buy, like they have no say in it. They’re the ones who decide what most people know about in the first place!

I don’t entirely agree that people are hard-wired to prefer long fiction (or monogamous relationships, but that’s another argument entirely). I do think that Boomers and older readers may have been trained to like the longer form, but I’m not so sure about younger generations. We’ll see.

And I’m thrilled to hear about the stuff at your bookstore. Very exciting!

By: Maida

Maida — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 17:53:03 +0000

You’ve posed an interesting chicken-and-egg question. What is keeping publishers from selling short stories? Is it the erroneous belief that the audience for short stories is confined to a small pool of literary readers, which then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as you suggest? Or is it the possibly true fact that no matter how heavily short story collections are marketed, only a slender slice of the population will want to read them? I don’t believe it’s just a matter of marketing, though marketing surely plays a critical role. (Case in point: I was amazed to witness the number of people who read the Proulx and Munro short stories on which the films Brokeback Mountain and Away From Her were based, respectively. The publicity and exposure of the films led people to the stories, and readers didn’t shun the stories just because they were short. But did these readers then want to read entire collections by Proulx and Munro? I doubt it.)

I think most readers are hard-wired to prefer long fiction over short fiction, in the same way that most people seek long-term monogamous relationships vs. serial one night stands. But perhaps you would argue that the hard-wired preference for long-fiction I’m positing is not hard-wiring at all, but a learned response due to the greater marketing resources publishers devote to long fiction.

There are some glimmers of hope in terms of marketing of the short form. At my local bookstore this month I was thrilled to see a large promotion of short story collections featuring a free newsprint publication from Harper Perennial with a headline quoting Ann Patchett: “SUMMER IS SHORT, READ A STORY.” Inside, the short story “Tiger, Tiger” from Simon Van Booy’s collection Love Begins in Winter, was reprinted. Other short story collections, contemporary and classic, were also promoted in this newsprint publication, and readers were directed to fiftytwostories.com,, a site that posts a different story on the web every week. Also, last time I looked, I was heartened to see two short stories collections, Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout and Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri, appear on one of the NYT’s Best Sellers lists.