Art always has two sides – the crass side, the commercial or business side, and the creation and artistic side. Publishing short stories, a critical component of literary fiction, has a commercial side that seems to defy all business logic, but is just as crass. The problem seems to be two fold – far too much supply over demand and an important subset of customer, the reader, is left out of the business model.
Writing and publishing short stories is the early gestation period for eventually birthing a novel. Very few writers plan on making a living or staking their careers on publishing only short stories. There’s no money in it because there are so few readers. But virtually all writers of literary fiction start with short stories. And the miniscule population of short story readers is largely comprised of the same people who write them.
Here’s some of the business illogic of short story publishing as I’ve experience it, and many others, too.
When I started thinking about submitting some of my short stories more than a dozen years ago, I was struck by how many literary journals demanded that your story not be submitted to any other journals while it was under consideration by their staff. No simultaneous submissions. In the same paragraph or on the same page, they advised, “send us only your best work,” and “please allow 3-6 months for a response.”
Why would a self respecting business man or woman take their “best product” off the market and allow a potential partner, or at least a distributor for said product, exclusive right for six months to ponder whether they will deign to “carry” it?
You would think a literary journal would find ways to attract customers, e.g., readers. The most obvious customer base is the hopeful writers who submit stories to them. Well, not only do they insist on holding your best work hostage until they’re ready to reject it, they almost unanimously also tell you, “Due to the volume of submissions we receive, we are unable to offer feedback on your work.”
In other words, after holding it for six months, they aren’t going to tell you why they refuse to do business with you. These are the same journals which implore you to buy a copy or subscription, support their publication, and champion their mission.
It’s like McDonald’s telling you eating at Burger King is verboten until McDonald’s decides you aren’t allowed to eat at McDonald’s.
I don’t know about you but I think a potential life-long customer (or at least for a very long time) for a literary journal is the battered writer rejected by dozens of my competitors who actually receives a letter or note about their work, some recognition that a human actually engaged with it, or at least a few paragraphs of it, not an undergraduate intern automaton sticking form rejection notes into envelopes or pasted into emails.
I mean, why don’t literary journals treat every writer who submits as a potential reader customer rather than a writer whose product didn’t meet their standards?
Rather than reject a writer, establish a relationship with a customer who might tell others about his/her positive customer experience.
Literary journals often run competitions with a fee for entry, usually $15-25, or charge a “reading fee” to consider your submission. Often, a year’s subscription is included with the fee. On first blush, you might think this is in keeping with the competitive spirit of American business. Yet I, as the customer, think: Shouldn’t they be paying me to send them my contact information so they can send me their promo collateral in perpetuity?
It’s the same intention when journals insist they want to discover “emerging writers.” In the same breath, or a few lines down, they add, that your work should be perfect from a proofreading and editing perspective. I’m sorry, but the chances of an “exciting emerging new voice in fiction” sending in a perfect manuscript is, I have to imagine, pretty darn low.
The dirty secret behind the thousands of print and on-line literary journals is that they have subscribers, they have “customers,” people who receive their product, but they don’t really have readers. They all know this, but no one really wants to talk about it. Literary journals exist to satisfy the academic need to “publish or perish.” Some of them have more lofty reputations than others, but few people actually read what’s in them.
It’s even questionable how many people read the short stories in the loftiest slots available, yes, The New Yorker (and The Atlantic, Harpers, and a few other elite publications). My admittedly anecdotal analysis of The New Yorker over the years suggests that they publish short stories from authors who have new books or collections coming out soon, or had come out recently. From the crass commercial perspective, one might say that the weekly short story slot is often reserved for these authors as much for a promotional device as a worthy short story. Not that anyone would concede this.
Except for the top publications, publishing emerging or unknown writers does nothing little for these journals or the writer, unless that writer gets famous one day and they can claim “discovery.” Publishing writers who are already well known does everything for them. Other writers can only hope to share ink and dead trees (or their digital equivalents) with those already known because that’s the only way he/she is going to get noticed. Of course a story published in the three magazines listed above is a stamped ticket to the inner orbit of literary fiction.
And if there is need for any further evidence of the non-competitive nature of this business, consider that, for most of the short story publishing outlets, the wording under their “how to submit” button is eerily similar.
Except for those lofty few elite publications, short story writers don’t get paid. They are expected to publish for free and write their stories after they’ve spent the better part of the day, week, or year earning a living by other means or living off the kindness of spouse, family, or friends.
Once again, I have to ask, where is the reader, the ultimate customer, in this business scenario?
From a business 101 perspective, the supply of short story product is like a firehose in the collective mouth of the literary journals. For every available publishing slot, hundreds if not thousands of products compete for the “shelf space.” No wonder the journals can be so callous to their writer customers. One literary quarterly, not even a year after launch, reportedly was receiving 700 submissions every quarter. It publishes around a dozen stories. Do the math. It’s a 1.7% chance. Established journals will have a far worse chance, several thousand submissions for every slot.
How many businesses do you know that can charge a customer up to $25 for a lower than 1.7% chance they will get anything in return? Not even a casino is that bad (well, maybe the slots).
Again, I ask, where is the reader in this business model?
Readers who happen to love the short story face an almost impossible task: where to find and read short stories that are either great, miss greatness but for the right reasons, or otherwise are worth your investment in time as a reader and a writer? MFA and creative writing programs proliferate. Supply keeps growing. Distribution gets easier and easier with today’s on-line publishing and communications platforms. But those in control of distributing the product are doing so to build the resumes of credentialed writers (those with English degrees or passing through MFA programs or writing workshops), not to attract serious short story readers.
Imagine going into a store that sold only short stories. Each month the inventory could potentially expand by thousands if not tens of thousands. In a logical production and supply value chain, there would be a retail function to help customers match product to their needs and tastes. Good bookstores, especially independent ones, do this for books. And novels (and to a lesser extent story collections) are supported by a large ecosystem of catalogues, reviewers, critics, bloggers, and on-line and bricks and mortar retail outlets.
There is no credible retail function for short stories, unless they are disguised as books (The Best American Short Stories annual, for example), or they are issued as a collection after an author gets famous for his/her novels or (in rare instances) or other works. But good novelists don’t necessarily write the best short stories. In fact, their short stories may reflect mostly their experimentation and development towards novel writing. From the commercial crass business perspective, however, story collections from novelists will sell because they are leveraging an existing “brand.”
The only site I know of which comes close as a retail function is a blog (www.may-on-the-short-story.blogspot.com) by Charles May, a retired professor of literature who has published several books on short story analysis and critique. May’s posts are generally informative and even entertaining at times. One from August 3, 2010, lists May’s 100 favorite short story collections of the 21st century (in honor of his 100th blog post on short stories). He also from time to time will analyse how authors get to be published, who they know, who attended their MFA program with them, that sort of thing.
The Short Review (www.thenewshortreview.wordpress.com) site also aggregates reviews of short story collections, but again, it’s a one collection, one voice approach.
May writes in a very down-to-earth non-academic style. But he is just one voice. And he mostly comments on the authors and collections we all know about because they’ve been published through the elite channels or have published novels. Imagine if I could access half a dozen sites offering not just academic analysis but commentary from readers who happen to love short stories, whether they write them or not. Imagine if this site also covered great short stories from writers subsisting under the radar or even out of its range.
There is no on-line store exclusively focused on helping me identify the short stories I want to read and sell them to me. I can try to sift through hundreds of sites where dozens of short stories (and in the case of Amazon, thousands) are available and hope that I randomly land on one I might appreciate, or browse through stories that are “pushed” to me on request from other sites (Narrative, Every Day Fiction). Only a few distributor/publisher types (One Story is a good example) send you only one story at a time with your subscription. With a mainstream publication of culture and politics, you get the short story only as part of the larger package.
The literary short story marketplace is inefficient. Producers (writers) can’t find real customers. Distributors cater to a certain class of producer as customers, those who need the publishing credentials to succeed in their careers.
Even reading groups and book clubs rarely select short stories or collections.
It functions under a “push” retail business model. Publishers “push” stories selected for reasons that are not wholly aligned with readers interests. It needs more of a “pull” function in the retail business model. Customers, readers, need to be treated as customers. They need help, a friendly sales person, a welcoming store, more trusted sites not dedicated to publish or perish, a place to gather face to face or on-line with friends to discuss, suggest, recommend, and share.
Maybe the market for short stories is simply too small to warrant a true retail “pull” function. Maybe the customer base is small because writers, producers, and distributors don’t spend enough time and effort cultivating and retaining true readers rather than creating clubs that exist largely to satisfy their own professional interests.
Maybe, just maybe, if the retail function were made more efficient, more readers would become paying customers and a few more short story writers could get paid.
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