Mark Trainer publishes an excerpt of a note he received from a “thoughtful, well-respected agent” on his blog.
“I have no confidence in being able to place a collection at this time in the world of publishing. Publishers don’t like to publish short story collections in general unless they are VERY high concept or by someone very strange or very famous or Indian. In the current climate, it is harder to publish even those. Some of the authors I represent have story collections I have not been able to talk their loyal publishers into publishing. I can’t in good conscience encourage you to send them to me. It will just make both of us feel bad. I am very sorry. If you write another novel, I will gladly read it.”
I may be doing a bit of armchair publishing here, but what are the publishing houses thinking?
The form of the short story collection is so uniquely well-suited to the Internet age. A good short story should grab you by the junk and make you yelp in that first line. So should good web copy. A good short story should be no longer than it need be. So should good web copy. I could go on. There are many very important differences between the two types of writing, but the publishing houses could be taking advantage of the similarities to develop a model that could turn a profit.
For example, a publishing house could publish one of the stories online — a story that is particularly well-suited to the Internet —with a link to purchase the book, somehow getting the blogs to link to and excerpt the most exciting few sentences of that story. They could also do trailers like this one at Electric Literature to help build awareness of their product. If something, either a trailer or a story, went viral, they could make a ton of money on advertising, as well as help create a “brand” so people will see the book and buy it in the stores (P.S. the word “brand” makes me want to vomit on the nearest person wearing a suit). Next thing they know, they could have their short story collections next to the zombie books at Urban Outfitters.
I don’t see publishers taking advantage of these possibilities very much at all. Or if they are, they aren’t doing it loudly enough that I, a nearly thirty-year-old nerd with no kids who spends too much money on books (i.e. their target audience), has heard anything about it.
It seems to me that all it would take is a tiny bit of ingenuity to make money off the right short story collection. Why aren’t the publishing houses trying it?
41 responses
Sounds like a viable model to me. Why don’t you start a publishing company and see if you can build your own niche?
Janet
I’m on it.
P.S. Could I borrow a hundred thousand dollars and a list of publishing connections? 🙂
You couldn’t be more right, Seth, but I have no faith that the major publishing houses will take you up on it. They’ve been moaning about the difficulty of short story collections for a long time now, even before the current crisis in the industry, even before the ubiquity of the Internet and the kind of Web writing you’re talking about. At the same time, everyone complains that Americans have such short attention spans that they can’t read novels anymore – and yet somehow that doesn’t strike anyone as an opportunity for a short-story revival.
The fact is, though, that there just isn’t the manpower or imagination to put something like this into place. Editors – most of whom are still really smart, thoughtful people who love books – barely have time to edit anymore, so swamped are they with aspects of publishing that used to be other departments’ responsibilities. Publishers are fending off the demands of corporate overlords for 15% profit margins (margins in the mid-20th century heyday of publishing were 3-4%). And most of the people in publicity depts. are fresh out of college, with little experience in the industry, and no autonomy to try anything new.
Like all our other hopes for the future of book publishing, we’ll have to look to the independent and smaller houses to try new and creative things. Unfortunately, these houses are less attractive to many agents, who don’t stand to make huge money off the advances they can offer. (Some agents, of course, love books and authors enough to deal with smaller houses, but they are in the minority.)
Publishers have always hated short story collections. Which is strange when you think of books like Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Or even Denis Johnson’s “Jesus’ Son.” And yeah, with today’s short attention span, ADD, lack of commitment, and a reading challenged society, you’d think anything “short” would work….
They sell zombie books at Urban Outfitters?
I agree with Andrew. It’s going to be small, maneuverable publishing houses that pick up the dropped ball in this area. I think we’re approaching a perfect storm scenario, in fact, wherein short story collections will indeed begin to sell:
1) We have, as people have pointed out, this attention span issue.
2) We have a growing number of small presses full of dedicated editors willing to publish collections.
3) One thing big presses have traditionally been able to offer over small presses* is publicity. But with the rise of blogs and inexpensive internet ad space, it is no longer difficult or expensive to promote or market books. It just takes a little ingenuity.
4) Finally, you no longer need a hard cover release to receive book coverage in the Times and elsewhere
Together, I believe these factors will soon create an atmosphere in which story collections are published, publicized, reviewed, and actually bought in large numbers.
*this, too, is changing, however, as big presses are shying away from advances for literary titles, exploring alternative contracts with small advances and substantial profit sharing (Harper Perennial). Small presses, too, such as Flatmancrooked, are experimenting with this model.
I’m leaning to a different view and a different theory I’ve been stewing on, which starts with what I suspect readers want. Looking at my own behavior as a reader, I noticed that my interest in short stories is not equal to my interest in short story collections. I might read four stories by a given author in The New Yorker over a couple years prior to the collection being published. But whenever I buy a collection, however much I may admire the author, I usually end up reading about half the stories before I get distracted by some other book. In fact, I’ve noticed that I’m much more likely to finish an anthology of multiple authors or all of a literary journal than a collection by a single author.
So I would say that publishers might think about ways to make money publishing more short stories but not necessarily more story collections. Those “year’s best” anthologies represent one model that seems to work pretty well. If I were in charge, I would consider shorter, cheaper collections by single authors. (Why does a collection have to be 200 pages worth of stories? Why not 75 pages?) Anthologies of emerging writers from a given publisher. Anthologies mixing the short work of those same young Turks along with recognized names. They could even take a cue from non-profit journals and promote their next quarter’s catalog with short stories and novel excerpts in periodical form.
Thanks for this piece.
Richard Nash is supposed to be coming out with a new business model for publishing that the above ideas would fold into nicely. Keep putting this progressive thinking out there. We could give up, or take advantage of being on the cusp of big, positive changes for literature. I choose the latter.
Could the problem be that many short stories are boring?
I think it is. I think that the short story, as a form, is built around the idea of perfection: those sort stories that are most praised are those that are best crafted — each moment resonant against the next, each scene trimmed to its most basic communicating details, etc etc — and that what gets left out of this formula a lot of the time is interest. In other words, it’s possible to achieve a perfect, textbook short story that no one wants to read.
Novels on the other hand aren’t constrained by craft questions because they’re so long that any hope for perfect craft kind is remote. So you’ve got some loose baggy monsters, and the only way to get people to read and admire these loose baggy monsters is to make them interesting/worthwhile in other ways.
NOTE. I am not saying that all short stories are boring or that all novels are not boring. Nor am I saying that there are no perfectly crafted novels, or that all short stories that get published are perfectly crafted. I am saying that it’s a better bet to find a bit of diversion in a novel than in a collection, where everything is honed, respectable, and thus a bit torpid.
It is great to see this conversation taking place. I am the Executive Director at the above mentioned small house, Flatmancrooked. Robert hit on a point which we’ve already begun to pursue. Beginning with our publication of the rather long short story by Emma Straub, ‘fly-over state,’ we are going to begin publishing in single-author form a single short stories in book form, and then sell them at a wildly affordable prices. In the instance of ‘fly-over state’ the book will cost $5 on our site, $8 list.
To further value this mini-book, the first run will be limited edition, numbered and signed. This is all in addition to the fact that we’ve staked our reputation on publishing only high-quality, well-crafted stories. What we are trying to do is give our patrons a book that is affordable and wildly accessible (you can read this whole story in about an hour), and give authors who may have unsalable collections or a good short story/novella but not a ready novel a shot at adding a single author credit to their resume. Thus far, with Emma’s book anyway, this model has been a success. We wait patiently now for larger publishers to steal this model and make millions.
Now that I’ve plugged to death I’d like to point out that many of these models have been around for quiet some time in the micro/small/indie/art press world and is a means of survival. At Flatmancrooked we simply do not have the luxury to publish 100 books and hope that one is a big enough hit to cover the rest of the failures. As a result we publish only work we truly love and believe in and then promote the snot out of it. It seems like this is the way the publishing industry should be. But I’m an idealist.
So, the answer to Seth’s question is this: The reason big publishers haven’t tried this is that they are not in the business of publishing craft and promoting literature. They are sales entities and nothing else. I mean, we all, big and small, must sell to survive. But when your company is sales-driven as opposed to sales-dependent then your hands are tied. If a sales model works, for instance, publishing a ton of vampire books one year, then you go with it. If short story collections won’t sell or are perceived to be unsalable then you don’t publish them. The point is, at the end of the day the big boys have to answer to shareholders and us small fish have to answer to our readers and authors. Thus quality wins out over quantity. I prefer my world to theirs.
P.S. – Dear Seth,
Flatmancrooked started with 5k, a home office, a few of interns, and an unwavering standard of quality and design. So, in other words, all you need is a good designer, a good author, and a good book printer. That last of the three I can help you out with. Oh, and a willingness to work 90 hours a week and travel on your own dime.
For an example of what can be done with the innovative presentation of short stories, the New Zealand Book Council created a website called “Read at Work” which is well described here:
http://www.technospot.net/blogs/read-books-faked-as-presentations-at-your-workplace/
Sadly, the actual Read at Work site, linked to from that article, is down at present. One of my stories, “Win a Day with Mikhail Gorbachev!”, was included in “Read at Work”, and though it’s more readable in plain old print, I loved being part of such an innovative project.
What a great post. Thank you.
And Elijah – that is wonderful to hear. Keep up the splendid work!
Nik
Firstly, this agent’s candour (“VERY high concept or by someone very strange or very famous or Indian”) is at least refreshing, even if he is trotting out the same old story about short stories. Seth, I wholeheartedly agree about the fantastic marketing opportunities available for short story collections – to me this represents a huge failure of imagination on the part of the marketing departments of mainstream publishing houses, but I guess they like to do what they know, what they think they’re good at, and innovation ain’t that easy for them. There is SO much that can be done to promote a collection, on the Web and on cellphones etc…. Short stories lend themselves so well to being adapted into animated short films, to being given out at underground/subway stations, to being given out in the street, posted on billboards. Thank goodness for small innovative publishers like Flatmancrooked and my own publisher, Salt, who aren’t focussing on the very strange, famous or Indian, but just on great writing. Yeah, they aren’t making money, but they are performing a vital function.
Robert – who is standing over you and saying you must read a short story collection straight through, cover to cover, like a longer work? This is, I think, one problem: short story collections look like novels, are often shelved with novels, but should not be treated in the same way. They are closer to poetry. Dip in and out, that’s my advice, and I read at least one short story collection every month for review, and for pleasure. As someone once said (Ali Smith?): a short story collection is like a box of chocolates, savour one or two, then put the book down, come back later.
Matt: Short stories are boring??! May I invite you – and all lovers of good books – over to The Short Review, where we review short story collections of ALL shapes and sizes, from sci fi and fantasy to crime, mystery, experimental, chick lit, erotica, war stories… the list goes on and on. Enjoy!
Thanks for this discussion, Seth!
Big publishers don’t like to publish many s/s collections. But when they do, they always get mainstream press coverage in reviews; get shortlisted in major comps like the Frank O’Connor; get the collections into bookshops etc etc. So what are they complaining about? The real champions of s/s collections – the small presses – struggle on, with little media or book shop support. Luckily small press authors work v hard to promote their own books but there’s only so much one can do.
All promotional suggestions welcome for my forthcoming collection from Salt, ‘Nude’, due 1st Sep. Plug plug!
Tania, I think that was me who said that about chocolates! Either that or someone else and I think alike – or rather, it’s the basic truth about short stories: they are for savouring and taking one or two at a time.
Yes, I agree: short stories need a different kind of promotion and really shouldn’t be sold or read as if they are novels: no wonder people don’t get enough out of them when they are!
And since Nuala points out that in the current situation we need all the promotional help we can get, I’ll be bare-faced enough to take this opportunity to promote my own collection, Balancing on the Edge of the World (Salt)!
Tania,
I agree that collections and anthologies can be experienced differently than novels, and I do, dipping in like you describe. It’s not necessarily a problem not to finish a collection. But that emphasizes my point that this is to a certain extent a matter of the reader’s behavior. It is a market we’re talking about, and most buyers rationally are looking to get their money’s worth. “A few short stories can be as enjoyable as a whole novel,” is a reasonable sell but still a hard sell. I know that when I’m deciding how to spend my money in a bookstore, the experience of not finishing the last few collections I bought is a factor. It’s one more reason to chose the novel I’m interested in over the short story collection I’m interested in. Not every reader has that behavior every time, but some percentage will sometimes, and that makes it all the more difficult for publishers to commit to them.
Meanwhile I continue to read a ton of short stories in other formats — anthologies, the few magazines that publish them, literary journals. All I’m saying is that if we don’t equate the health of short story publishing with the health of short story collections, then other opportunities open up, for example what Elijah outlined.
Wow. So many good points have been made that I don’t even know how to begin to respond to them. I think small publishing houses are the way to go, but it also frustrates me so much that the big publishing houses are so tone deaf. I used to work in politics, and it reminds me of the Democratic Party circa 2003-4. They were losing everything they touched, and really had nothing to lose by experimenting, but instead of doing something innovative, they spent all their money on TV advertising, which just doesn’t work as well as grassroots campaigning.
Grassroots campaigns outside the party establishment, both online and offline, are what helped to change the party’s fortunes (also the worst president of at least the last seventy-five years was the figurehead of the opposition party. That didn’t hurt). To torture this comparison, the Democratic party establishment is now made up of many of the figures from those movements that began outside the party establishment. So Elijah, it may, eventually, be you who makes a ton of money. Then you can give me a hundred thousand dollars instead of that paltry five 🙂
P.S. I will still take five.
Oh, and Patrick, yes. They sell that zombie book at Urban Outfitters. Also everything ever written by Chuck Palahniuk. I think I even saw 9 Stories there once. And DIY books, I think. I don’t know. Haven’t been there in awhile, but if I recall, they actually have a pretty big book collection for a department store.
Interesting post. I’ve read a whole load of short story collections recently (some by one or two of your other posters, in fact) and I can say that I didn’t find a single one of them boring. The quality sometimes varies within each book, but the flipside of that is that you’ll usually find something that absolutely blows you away. It’s actually a much less risky option than investing in a novel, where you can spend several hours over a significant elapsed period of time, only to be disappointed in the end.
I am a passionate reader and writer of short stories and I’m enjoying this discussion very much. I’ve accepted that many of the serious readers of fiction I know genuinely do not enjoy reading short stories as much as they enjoy reading novels. They don’t want a box of chocolates to sample from, they want the satisfaction of a complete ten course meal. In fact, the short attention span issue is one reason readers might prefer novels. Once they are into a novel and familiar with the characters, they can pick it up and read it in five minute increments, while commuting, etc. A standard-length short story often requires a one-shot dedication of fifteen to twenty minutes, which many readers can’t seem to muster. I think that the majority of readers have a genuine resistance to the short form that big publishing houses have to deal with. I’m sad this is the case, but I don’t doubt the legitimacy of the preference among readers.
Maida, that is such an excellent point! I’ve never heard anyone express it so succinctly and so well, in the face of this crazy notion that short stories suit short attention spans. I may quote you!
And – if we’re all promoting, my short story collection is The White Road and Other Stories, a chocolate box (thanks, Elizabeth!) with a selection of 27 to tempt you!
Seth, thanks for opening up such a stimulating discussion.
True enough, this is a problem I am working on—if you check out my personal site http://RNash.com you can be added to the mailing list to be updated on what is happening with Cursor, a portfolio of reading/writing communities/imprints at least two of which will be publishing short fiction, singly and in collections. And providing an online home for more fiction than we could possibly publish by the conventional method but which we’ll work with the world to keep advancing.
Let me also draw your attention to:
http://fictionaut.com
http://cellstories.com
and http://featherproof.com
All explicitly short fiction friendly digital publishing enterprises in addition to the afore-mentioned Electric Literature.
I obviously agree with most of the sentiments in this thread. On the specific note of ADD reading though I read an argument once (New Yorker? New York Times?) that short story collections actually take more attention because each story is a new world that the reader is entering whereas a novel is one world… perhaps the analogy to the current age is something like a TV series. A TV series may go on for a long time, as a novel can, but it is easy to jump in and out.
I think that makes sense, though it probably applies more to traditional short stories than to flash fiction.
I skimmed or read through most of this thread but stopped before Maida’s post… sorry to repeat their argument.
(although for whatever its worth I’ve always been the opposite, always preferred story collections to novels, sampling different ideas and worlds than trudging through one)
Lincoln, that is so true. A short story (rather like poetry) does need the kind of focused attention a novel doesn’t – which bears out Maida’s point about reading on trains. It’s the same, I find, when you’re writing them: it’s much easier to write a novel in a way, I find, than a series of short stories. While a novel is a big commitment in time, it does carry you along once you’ve got going, whereas with a series of short stories you need to envisage a whole new world each time you write a new story. Sometimes my last story has so strongly taken me over that I find it really hard to turn to a new one. And I do think the same processes apply with reading.
(This is a great discussion and airing of the topic; thank you, Seth!
Thank you everyone for this discussion. It has most definitely made my week. The quality of comments (and commenters!) is really incredible.
My question, though, for people saying that short stories take more energy because they require more time and attention (for you have to create a whole new world in each one), is this:
Wouldn’t then books of connected short stories be the most popular form of all? If each one is self-sustaining, but each one also has the same rules as all the others, wouldn’t that be the best format for our short attention span lifestyle?
Yet I remember hearing on some panel once that those sorts of books are the hardest to get published.
Why is that?
Hi Seth, hi everyone —
‘Twas I who sad that short stories are boring, and I agree with the folks here who have said they are not. So many of the short stories I love — and I love them — are not boring, and when I think of the best of them I think they are so enormously interesting that they almost tighten around a reader’s throat and threaten his/her life. Here I think of George Saunders’s “The Falls” and Brian Evenson’s “Younger” and Joyce Carole Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” and Lydia Davis’s “Breaking it Down” and so many others: amazing, perfect, gripping, as good as whole novels or better. I am not a story-hating beast. That said, I still contend that there are plenty of stories out there now that content themselves with the “true,” with the proper, with what is technically correct…
Anyway, Seth, here’s a try at working towards an answer to your latest question.
First, on the issue of the short attention-span lifestyle. I think we’ve seen a lot of stylistic response to this already. Consider, as a horrifying example, “The Da Vinci Code,” which is made up of chapters of like three or four pages each, I think. Or Peter Orner’s “Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo,” which is a fucking astounding incredible book that should never be within a sentence’s proximity to Dan Brown’s work, but is also made up of sections less than three or four pages long. These are novels, and they have been fractionated, just as a lot of short stories — made up of those subsectionary double-tap-of-the-return-key-in-the-word-processor bits — have tended toward the short and digestible. Past the page level, I think you need roughly the same attention ability to get through a twelve page short story made of tiny bits and a 300 page novel made of similar tiny bits. One just takes longer than the other to finish.
Linked stories, I think, are very new sorts of books, and while I have negative one million knowledge of the publishing industry and what works there and what doesn’t, I know that just as a reader it is sometimes hard to know how to approach a set of linked stories. I think sometimes authors get too tangled by the concept of “linked stories” and try to force their material into this set of units that all appear to work nicely with each other when put next to each other in the table of contents. So maybe linking stories tends to constrain them more than it connects them? Perhaps that’s why we haven’t seen a phenomenal linked-stories publishing breakout yet? But, as I said, I think that this idea of fiction is still so young that we shouldn’t expect a perfect union of concept and form and product just yet? I don’t know. Just: too early. Also, I haven’t read some of the big new linked stories collections. Olive Kitteredge, The New Valley, etc. Maybe they’re freaking tremendous. I’m stuck back on that Joan Silber book Ideas of Heaven, and Cloud Atlas (incredible, but vis-a-vis the linking of the narratives a bit flawed, maybe), and Tim Winton’s The Turning (pretty good, but maybe just ’cause I like Winston a ton) or others…
Here’s what I want to see in short story collections, anyway: two- or three-author collections. Like, if a book was 33% Dan Chaon and 33% Peter Orner and maybe 33% Steven Millhauser or whoever, five pieces each, that would be enough stories each to draw the respective fan bases (probably a lot of overlap there, but still..) and maybe broaden the sales base? Or like, 50% Michael Chabon and 50% some super cool newer person like Lauren Groff? I think there’s potential for artistic synergy there and also potential for sales? Or maybe it’s just super gimmicky and no one would go for it? Still, I dream…
I concur that this discussion is pretty tremendous. Go team!
I’m tapping this out on my cell phone, so pardon any spelling goofs. I just wanted to chime in and mention (has anyone already pointed this out?) how many of us are writers. It’s not a unique concern, particularly, but I often think about the number of short-story readers who write. It’s impossible not to wonder when so many ads in lit journals are for conferences, schools, books on writing, whatever, and when an author-interview is featured so many questions are centered around “process”–do you write in the morning? Do you have any special rituals? Do you start with an outline?–rather than that writer’s work. I remember reading a profile of Tobias Wolff recently, whom I have not met but who seems elsewhere like a he’ll of a guy, in which the interviewer tried to start off with a process question and Wolff actually made him move on. And even when the questions are about the work, they’re about things that can’t possibly matter to anyone but writers. Not too long ago Michael Silverblatt interviewed Wells Tower. I understand you either love or hate Michael Silverblatt; I happen to love him. I also loved Tower’s book. Anyway, a ridiculous portion of the interview was Silverblatt trying to get Tower to admit that his impulses were maximalist–not minimalist, as his slice-of-life stories would seem to suggest. And all I could think was; who cares? Silverblatt should know ad well as anybody that as a piece of language the word “minimalism” is dead, communicating almost nothing. I’m trying to think of the non-writing short-story reader giving a crap what they’re talking about. Then I wondered, what else would you talk about during an author interview? The author is probably least qualified, of anyone to talk about her own work. Probably too the least interesting. The problem is, I’m not sure this non-writing short-story reader actually exists. I don’t especially have a problem with that, i don’t think it’s necessarily something to worry about, it’s just we should be honest with ourselves. I don’t doubt that there’s some validity to the theory about contemporary readers’ short attention spans, but I don’t think that covers it. “Short attention span” smells like pop-psych to me. It doesn’t mean much. I don’t really believe that the digital age is rewiring our brains, at least not yet; I do think that there are more interesting-seeming things than reading a short story for the average person to be doing at any given moment. Most passionate short-story readers, I would guess, read for enjoyment, sure, but also as study, harvesting tricks of tone or narrative for their own work. Again, this seems to me like not such a crime, it’s just another way of reading. Should more people read stories? Of course! More people should try to write them, too. We should all be so intimate with language, with ourselves, with everyone around us. No doubt the short form, more than the novel, inspires emulation–not just because of it’s accessible length but because of the emotions they draw out, the creative connections they foster in a reader’s brain. When we read a short story we’re also writing it, filling in the blanks where the writer suggested an entire world. This rambling is all to say, the story is not dead, it’s just living under a bridge, eating beans out of a can, and mostly spends its time with other bums. Sometimes it will clean itself up and visit the bestseller list, but this is the way it seems to prefer things for now and it’s sort of outside of your control.
Great bolshy yarblockos to my phone’s autocorrect feature.
Go look at Facebook. The average length of a message is three sentences. The idea is that the reader is goofing off from work so it shouldn’t be much. I once read an email where the writer apologized for writing such a long email. It was ten sentences long. Quite a few people will become angry at an email of twenty sentences. It seems to be considered rude and impolite. Emails are supposed to either be business communications or brief fluff. Brevity rules.
Readers of novels, are there to escape. It’s a quantify game. “Give me 500 grams of fantasy, please.” They want to settle into a predictable world where one can be certain that the hero will have overcome all obstacles by the final chapter. Miss Marple always gets her man in more or less the same way. Four billion sold.
WHAT I WANT IS A YOUTUBE FOR WRITERS. Youtube has finally allowed music to circumvent the intestinal obstruction that is the music industry. I can hear the latest from Sri Lanka, Kazakhstan, South Korea, and its great. WHY CAN’T THERE BE A SITE WHERE ANYONE MAY POST HIS/HER WORK FOR FREE? The value of Youtube is that somehow they have made it easy to find quality stuff. http://www.writing.com is way lame.
Traveller’s Tales has published meny collections of short works.
I have never gotten too upset about print publishers wringing their hands about there being no market for the short story form, within collections or without.
That makes my digital offerings all the more appealing to my short story-starved global audience. I have over 60 exciting short stories in my Web site inventory just waiting for you!
Why not come on by for a look?
Wayne C. Long
Writer/Editor/Internet Publisher
http://www.LongShortStories.com
Where the Short Story LIVES!
The lack of interest among the literate for the short story makes a horrible sort of sense to me. I think there are a lot of great things that can be done in the form (and I’m always trying to come up with another of them), and every year there are short stories that are worth hunting down. But those are for the writers and the hardcore readers. The people who will even pay for the Best American Short Stories collections, which ought to be a softcore reading crowd, but is honestly a tougher one.
Short fiction is already doubly handicapped; literacy is shrinking, and among the literate, non-fiction is beating fiction. Already it’s in a bad corner of media. But literature is perhaps the most demanding art form to its audience. You must do it alone unless you do it out loud in a group, which almost no one does. You use your eyes on the page, your ears must be tuned out to external stimulus rather than complimented by a dialogue track or film score, and your mind is more active. Instead of processing how someone looks, you have to imagine it. The escapism of great literature is among the deepest in the art forms, but it’s because of the demand on your mind, investing everything in it. And when people want that sort of engagement, most don’t want it for only ten or twenty pages. They want it to last, and so they buy novels. Many of my friends are voracious readers and none of them have read a short story collection in the last year; the last time one of them came up was a friend returning one to me, having in six months not “found the time to read it,” despite having gone through four Laurel Hamilton novels. Even Neil Gaiman and Stephen King have commented that their publishers cringe at their short story collections, because despite their titanic reputations, many more people will buy their novels. Their short story anthologies will sell more than mine or yours, but are still not optimal products.
The short story has always had to compete for attention, but it has more competition now than ever. You can fill those short periods of time when you want to be entertained with TV, DVR, box sets of TV shows, youtube, e-mail, blogs, twitter, iPhone games, portable videogames and myriad other things that are either more pressing to one’s life or less demanding on the brain. Hell, a fiction magazine sale has to compete with a free NPR broadcast of actors reading writers! There are simply so many cheap or free things you can do while sitting for half an hour or less that the engagement of short fiction is doomed. And in a culture where we’re so conditioned for visual media, literature was going to struggle anyway. Fahrenheit 451 was about that; but before all books sink into the wasteland, short stories would naturally go first.
Great discussion. I like the episodic story collection idea.
I also hear the immersion reason. Some readers want to get to know the characters and grow with them. Finding incomplete stories, slices of life, deters readers. When looking at short fiction publications, I find too many short stories that are incomplete or feel rushed.
Reading short fiction is a different experience from a novel. I wonder if the lack of available short story collections in book stores has conditioned the majority of consumers to prefer novels. Since a wide variety of short fiction publications exist on the web, many of them free, collections must compete with easy access.
Does the short story need an evolution in distribution or style? Delivering stories to phones/portable devices is an interesting idea.
My attention span is so bad that by the time I scrolled to the bottom of the comments I’d forgotten what this post was about. Ah, but seriously.
I think it is the hour of the illustrated novella myself.
I’ve been looking for audio collections of short stories on (Australian) iTunes and (along with a serious dearth of Australian literature in general) there are hardly any short story collections. It is very disappointing and short stories and iPods seem made for each other – look at the vast popularity of This American Life, surely it is its narrative qualities rather than the content itself that makes TAL so successful (again, as an Australian, I can’t say it is high on my list of cultural priorities to discover the interior mechanisms of American culture – but I AM addicted to storytelling).
Having said that I kind of like the short story being in the care of small independent publishers and literary journals – it gives the short story a vitality that it might lose in the hands of multinationals, as the integrity of the novel is undermined by the sheer quantity of crap novels lining the bookshelved. I know no one gets rich that way, but in a way that’s good, it means that short stories have a resilience that isn’t dependent on the vagaries of economics.
Wow, you’ve gotten quite a lot of comments. Seems the short story collection is much debated thing. It seems there’s lots of interest in them. I have a few I dip into occasionally and am always happy to pick up more. And it seems those lurking the interwebs have a higher proportion than others.
I didn’t read all of the comments but I’ve seen some mention of short fiction collections being the domain of smaller publishers. I’m ok with that.
In fact, I’m considering publishing my collection myself. No need for it be a best seller.
The proposition that short stories should appeal in a time-pressured world where people consume culture, especially text, distractedly and in chunks, ignores the degree of absorption required to read a good story. As a reading mode it’s more akin to approaching poetry and not comparable to most web grazing. Reading Leonard Michaels is not a dipping experience. (OK – that’s an argument from the extreme).
There are good formal reasons why single-authored short story collections could be shorter. I was struck by how well Claire Keegan’s recent Walk the Blue Fields worked – quite a short book. In theory publishers could publish short books of short stories at lower prices to get readers interested, but the numbers are against it.
Unfortunately readers often see short stories both as poor value for money and ‘not what I was looking for’. They’re looking for absorption in a narrative world. A contrast with the distracted worlds of family and work (even if the actual reading experience is twenty minutes on the train and another ten before falling asleep.) Rightly or wrongly most readers associate this with the novel. In the weigh-off between Deborah Eisenberg and a new Richard Ford novel readers mostly swing to the novel.
As a non-writer, occasional novel reader and vaguely interested in short stories I offer the following:
For a guy like me, the reason for buying any form of media has nothing to do with the style (or my attention span) and everything to do with the void I am trying to fill. If I am taking an flight overseas I will pick up a novel (i.e. 4 hours plus). If I want to hang out by the pool then I’ll grab a magazine. If I want to kill 15 – 30 minutes then I’ll surf the web. If I want to kill 30-60 minutes then I’ll watch TV, play X-box, read a newspaper. If I want to fill in 1-2 hours then I’ll watch a movie.
This doesn’t mean that people like me are not interested in the concept of short stories, nor sometimes inspired or moved by those that cross our path. It’s just they have never really had a neat fit…until now.
If I am waiting at the dentist (like I was this morning) I pick up my phone and surf the web hunting for a good short story. As simple as that, time lost is suddenly found.
How a writer can make any serious money out of it (or publisher for that matter) is beyond me. The new access that brings the hope of popularity also means that writers looking for payback compete with the mass market of people who are just happy for someone else to read what they have to say – not money. Like me, now, for instance.
At best this is an art form that will be promoted by the sellers of tools like i-phones… in order to make the features of the hardware seem more “necessary”
OK, some web based, easy/free access, library probably exists but c’mon – you need a non-sensical name before it would ever make a difference.
twitter, blog, bing, yahoo, google…
mmm…What about … ‘blast’ (more resounding than a tweet, more intense than a blog, more depth than bing, more emotion than yahoo, more visionary than google…but still very simple)
The race is on for the first Blast and if you are looking for some inspiration then Blast me this…
… a group of intellects lamenting the state of their art, suddenly inspired by a layman who possessed no skill but had an extraordinary vision. And it was that vision that had set them free and brought about the rise of a global empire, where layman and intellect alike were bonded by a single notion…
Emotion, in its many forms, is triggered in the simplest of way, in the briefest of moments. This is the essence of the Blast.
Now get of this website, forget about how to make money out of your passion and start writing. You too could one day be a Master Blaster.
And remember you were part of history…when the Blast was born.
Blast Out.
BLAST was the vorticist organ of Ezra Pound’s fantastical self-important self, from WWI times. Oh well, might as well re-use the name… in “self-conscious ironic tribute” of course.
Harper tried something…pairing a classic story or two with a brand new one:
http://amzn.to/8X9gku
that’s a link to the series.
Chris Kubica
Thank you, Seth, for initiating this wonderful topic.
I am an avid reader, I have had a life-long love affair with short stories – I have a deep interest in reading light prose.
I totally relate to Maida’s comment earlier. For me, short stories offer the following benefits (a) short stories are more “pointed†than longer works of fiction (b) while reading short stories I do not get bored – my attention is fixed on finding out what happens next, quickly, unlike when reading a novel where the story can drag on and on and there is not much development or action (c) short stories tend to be less complex that novels, which I like especially when I just need a simple and short moment to escape from daily routine.
In spite of my deep interest in short stories, there are times when I also suffer from the common short attention span issue. With a short story, you normally need to commit to read that piece in one sitting in 15 or 30 minutes, depending on the length of the story. With a big novel, you know the plot and the characters, you can pick and read for 5 – 10 minutes and leave it for later.
I believe that due to the small attention span issues, fewer people these days read short stories. This is unfortunate because it means few people will get to experience the pleasure and enjoyment that reading such wonderful work can provide.
However, combining modern platforms of media – the internet media, tablet computers (ipads/ibooks etc), the increasing small attention span issues among readers, short stories is a niche that has potential to be tapped.
Click here to subscribe today and leave your comment.