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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.