A few weeks ago, I argued that the Internet age was uniquely well suited to selling short story collections. A few commenters did not agree with what seemed to be implicit in my argument: the idea that the “short attention span” or “ADD” culture is in fact better for short stories.
Instead, they said, short stories take more effort than a novel because the reader has to expend the energy to create a whole new world with each story they read. I wholeheartedly agree.
The problem, of course, is that what I was trying (and possibly failing) to say had nothing to do with short attention spans.
In fact, I was saying that the problem was not with short stories but with marketing. Marketers are expert at selling whatever the hell they want, no matter how inane (see Handerpants, Dan Brown, pork brains, Twitter). If someone can sell Handerpants, what’s keeping publishers from selling short stories, especially when they work so well on the Internet?
Marketers and big publishing houses seem to have this assumption that we, the customers, will only buy books that are less than literary. This belief is self-fulfilling, because unless readers really go above and beyond, we only hear about the books they think we want to buy. I’m not saying that marketers are these evil overlords who can wave their hands and make us buy whatever they tell us to, but to a large extent, they have control over the products we hear about and how we hear about them, which means they have a lot of power over how reading customers choose what we want to read in the first place.
At the same time, people are obsessing over how we can change literature to save it from the coming end times. Over at Conversation Reading, Andrew Seal is spiritedly taking on Lev Grossman’s claim that we need more plot-oriented literature to keep the world reading:
“(Grossman) brings out Stephenie Meyer and compares her boffo sales to those of Nam Le’s (quite plotty) short story collection, The Boat. Just look at those numbers! Surely the enormous difference means something! Surely it means “Literature: You’re doing it wrong.”
I don’t know if Grossman is just really unaware that the sales:pleasure ratio doesn’t work the way he’s describing, or if he’s being purposely disingenuous, but this idea that “readers” aren’t getting what they’re looking for in The Boat and so they turn to Twilight is intellectually reprehensible. Grossman has imagined “the reader” as an extremely simplified consumer of pleasure, uniform in age, means, education, and taste; and the world of literature as a wholly unified, absolutely non-diversified market.”
I don’t necessarily want to put myself in the middle of the particulars of their argument, but the really interesting thing Seal is pointing to here is the construction of these things called “readers” and how that informs how we try to “save literature.” And unfortunately, right now, the big publishing houses are determining who “readers” are. And they don’t think many “readers” likes literature.
But the fact is that nothing will change until the big publishers stop throwing their hands up, saying, “Literature is not what the readers want.” They’re the ones who help determine what it is that “readers” want because they determine who they target as “readers.” The publishers have already decided that Twilight will sell like a successful kids book while The Boat will sell like a “literary book of short stories,” so they’re out their pimping Twilight like Bible salesmen and selling The Boat to literary elites and bored English majors (just look at the blurbs!). And guess what? The kids are going to school dressed up like Twilight characters and only a select few adults are talking about the The Boat. If the big (and, in some instances, small) publishers keep targeting only this single pool of “literary readers,” literature will die no matter how many ways we try to change it.
3 responses
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.
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!
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.
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