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CommentAuthorInkblot
- CommentTimeOct 25th 2011
I heard a long time ago on a blog far far away that there’s really no market for short stories, or for novels that haven’t been padded out to 60K or more.
I don’t know anything about where you would sell them, how hot the demand for them is, how much money they pull in, who reads them, anything. Apologies for the stub post.
Anyone know about this? I’m pretty curious.
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CommentAuthorKyllorac
- CommentTimeOct 25th 2011
There are plenty of publishers that specialize in short stories, much less publish short stories period. How populous these publishers are, as well as their standards, depends on your genre, but they’re a mighty healthy population in the fantasy and sci-fi genres (which I primarily write).
As for novels shorter than 60K, there are markets out there for novellas, and I’ve most commonly heard that 40K is a good length for a first novel as it’s more likely to be published. Generally, the longer the work, the greater the publishing costs and smaller the profit. Publishers will generally be more willing to seriously consider publishing your novel if it is on the shorter side rather than the longer, unless they have a thing about publishing longer novels only.
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CommentAuthorInkblot
- CommentTimeOct 25th 2011
Thanks. I was unsure how much of this fellow’s somewhat unstable and passionate rant to believe. I wish I remembered where I found it. The idea was basically that publishers prefer to sell books of at least 600-700 pages because they appear more worth the thirteen bucks or whatever, and that books which can’t fill these shoes are undesirable and less likely to be published. The author was of the opinion that many modern New York Times List doorstoppers were guilty of large amounts of useless filler to meet this requirement.
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CommentAuthorTakuGifian
- CommentTimeOct 26th 2011
That depends where you’re from. In Australia, there are more short stories published annually than there are novels. And there’s far more money to be made from short stories, short story competitions and compilations/anthologies of short stories than from full-length novels. In, say, England, however, the reverse might well be true (I don’t know, I’m just using ‘England’ as a generic ‘not-Australia’).
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CommentAuthorMiel
- CommentTimeOct 29th 2011
In North America, I think that short stories are unlikely to turn a huge profit like novels, unless you’re already a well-known published authors who churns out a pretty regular supply of short stories for anthologies and other publications. For amateur writers, though, most stories are published in magazines which are sold by subscription (those already subscribed get the short stories, vs. people buying the publication specifically for the short stories). Magazines don’t pay much per story (on average ~$50) but getting your stories published can be a great basis to gain some good press and some good reviews before going to write a longer work for wide-scale publication. It’s difficult to become well-read and well-known by writing short stories alone, though.
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CommentAuthorSteph (what is left)
- CommentTimeNov 17th 2011 edited
Taku, I had no idea of that. Fascinating…
I mean, I see a fair amount of short story compliations and stuff, and I guess there’s always the fact that Andrew Denton, Paul Jennings and Andy Griffith sell/sold really well. All of whom were short stories for kids type of guys.
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CommentAuthorTakuGifian
- CommentTimeNov 17th 2011
I’m not even talking about the big names, Steph. There are more short story anthologies in Melbourne than there are major newspapers.
You can find many of them at SPUNC, the Small Press Underground Networking Community.
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CommentAuthorSteph (what is left)
- CommentTimeNov 18th 2011
....TAKUILOVEYOU.
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