People lament the death of the short story, but the short story isn’t dead. Its readers are. The prevalence of graduate programs in creative writing has produced a virtual armada of short story writers all desperately seeking to get “published.” Some need it for their annual performance review (those lucky enough to get those coveted jobs in academia). Others are clamoring for it to have one more line on their CV, in the hopes they might get one of the coveted jobs in academia. They submit and submit and submit to every journal out there, often in raw, obstinate defiance of the editor’s guidelines and aesthetic preferences. And, sigh, finally, there is the total amateur, those random outsiders who submit their “untrained” manuscripts—don’t they know there’s a system us MFAers have set up? So, no, there is no dearth of short stories out there in the world. And, amongst them, there are many fine works. But, where are their readers? Who is our audience? For every short story writer produced out of our graduate programs, there are three others who didn’t (yet) make it into a program, but are still writing and submitting nonetheless. Of these writers, they have, what, 5-10 readers apiece? Their closest friends and family will take ten minutes out of their day to click that link posted on Facebook, haplessly skimming the prose to get to the end, all to come back and leave a pleasant little comment in the box under the link, “oh, you’re so talented. Loved it. J”
But, does anyone actually read this stuff? I mean, besides ourselves? And, do we even read this stuff? Yes, of course we read. We read as much as we can. I try to follow a handful of various lit journals, some in print, most online (because they’re free – we’ll get to the dollars and sense of it all later). But, that’s a drop in the bucket when thinking of the number of these journals out there.
So, yes, what did I do in the face of this overwhelmingly large vat of indistinguishable journals? I started one more.
But, I’ve learned as much or more in the past several months of doing this as I did during my time as an MFA student. For one, being an editor means other editors will actually talk to you. Who knew? I’m now on a first name basis with some of these persons. It’s quite refreshing. It’s also taught me a lot about formatting, packaging, marketing, etc. All things I wish I could have learned more of in my MFA program. I finally learned grammar. Almost. But, most importantly, it’s taught me the ultimate lesson of audience. Who is reading this stuff? The short answer: not many people. And, why should they? Why should the general public bother with us? They want Harry Potter and Twilight, and we all know this. We lament it, and poo-poo it at all opportunities. We quickly lecture our non-academic friends when we catch them with it. We lambast our literary theory academic associates if we catch them with it (always jumping on any excuse we can to assert our superiority over that “other” side of the English department). But, we’re staring right in the face of an important lesson and boldly not learning it.
People like that stuff.
They like it because it is disposable, and because they don’t need to think about it much, and they don’t have to invest in it much, and because the prose is usually accessible on a third grade level and can be burnt through quickly, and, most importantly, because it is fun.
Yes, the trash novel, the genre garbage, the shoot-em up, the courtroom intrigue, the, sigh, vampire romance, are fun for people.
The “literary” story has gotten so bogged down in pandering to the academic theorists and lit-crit folks, that it has all but abandoned the concept of entertainment. We’re too busy being important to be fun. Well, guess what: we’re not all that important anymore. Sure, our predecessors were and are. Barry Hannah, John Barth, David Foster-Wallace, Harry Crews, et al. They’re all the real deal. They got on this ship at the right time. And, their work stands up. But, hell, Barry and Harry are also just plain fun to read, too. And, I don’t know that that’s something true often enough of my generation’s MFA offspring.
We need to lighten up.
But, then two things hit me that changed everything about how I was looking at all this. I got wind of some former MFA colleagues’ poetry journal called Cellpoems. The idea is simple: you send in your cell number to a subscription list, and once a week a complete poem (albeit a short one) is texted right to you. This is their mode of publishing. It seemed brilliant.
Similarly, I had recently gotten my Blackberry smartphone (as with all things technological, I had put this off far longer than the rest of the free world), and was sitting, terrifyingly bored while in line at the barber shop, when I pulled this machine out of my pocket and began playing with all its many gadgets. I got bored with the bells and whistles and just jumped online with it, when it occurred to me, “hm, I wonder what Burnt Bridge looks like on this little thing.” Well, fancy enough, it popped right up, and even reformatted itself to a handy phone-screen size, and looked quite good. I jumped over to a few other journals, and the next thing I knew, I was reading short stories right there on my phone. I was delightfully refreshed, almost liberated. With this device in my hands, I would never be bored waiting in lines again. I could now double, nay, triple the amount of online journals I could follow. Stuck waiting for a flight? I’ve got short stories. Lunch meeting running late? Time for some flash fiction. Just can’t bear another minute of some pallid workmates’ dinner party conversation? I’ll whip over to the Collagist or Blip and see what’s new, and all the while look no more conspicuous than the mallrat across the room texting away to all her contacts. Yes, that’s the beauty: we now appear normal, just like every other avid “texter.” Remember the days when we were “that guy” at the party holding a paperback and ignoring the world? Now, we’re just like everyone else.
And, then came Kindle.
As of January 2011, Amazon.com reports that it now sells more Kindle ebooks than it does paperback copies. Richard Adams at Guardian.co.uk calls this a “landmark moment in the struggle between old versus new technology,” and it is just the tip of the iceberg. According to the article, the numbers only include “paid for sales” and does not factor in free Kindle ebooks downloaded to devices. Neither do these numbers account for all other ebooks sold under other retailer platforms, such as the also popular Barnes & Noble Nook. According to Amazon.com, the Kindle 3 became the highest-selling single unit in their history, outdoing even the Goliath Harry Potter.
Many die-hard fans of literature will vocally bemoan the death of the traditional book, but as small journals and publishers, we should be looking toward the market trend and our own bottom lines. The simple fact is, ebooks are where the future of the industry is going. They’re exquisitely cheap to produce (an hour or less of reformatting and the electricity to run your laptop), and they’re instantly distributable to readers. Ebooks download to the device in seconds from purchase. No shipping and handling. No waiting for the package to arrive.
And, the fact is, literary journals have been online for a decade now. Numerous fine journals have been publishing either both electronic and print format or exclusively online for some time now. Even many university sponsored journals are exclusively online. The venerable Mississippi Review for years had a separate, online counterpart that is now re-branded as the privately held journal BLIP (so titled as of this writing). So, what’s new about electronic literature?
Ebook devices are actually offering us the chance to meet with the printed word halfway. I myself have often griped at the trouble of reading online journals on those glaring, bright laptop screens. And, such attitudes have given rise to the increasingly popular (though not terribly lucrative) new form of the short-short story, the flash fiction, the 200-words-or-less-story. With these new devices, the glare is gone. The screen resembles the traditional page, and one can read for hours without strain. The question begs itself: why are we not jumping on this ship as fast as we can?
It’s such an easy adjustment. For those who publish online issues, simply load every piece into one file, reformat to a 3.5x5inch (the screen dimensions of the average device) PDF and upload to the site as a second option for viewing. Moreover, many eBook devices have their own, unique email address that can allow publishers to email viewable files directly to an individual’s unit. This can be a service the publisher provides to a maintained subscription list. Each month or quarter, when the new issue goes up, subscribers can have the full issue sent right to their units. It’s there waiting for them.
The best part is there’s no storage costs, no shipping costs, no per-unit cost to the publisher. For those of us who charge a cover price (which in many cases is holding us back from reaching more readers – because at 11.95 per issue, how many journals can we genuinely subscribe to?) this allows us to cut that price by more than half and still maintain the same bottom line. I can charge $3 for an electronic issue of Burnt Bridge compared to the $8+shipping cost of the printed copy and still maintain the same bottom line. But, the customer is saving over $5 and is reading the work immediately, instead of in 3-4 days waiting on the issue in the mail.
Some people will always want a printed book or magazine, and those will always be around (particularly with the advent of print-on-demand). But for most of us, electronic publishing is the way to get the material into the hands of the readers, and to actually get them reading it.
Another boon to the small press or journal publisher is this: We get submissions in by the garbage truck load. Log in to your email account in the morning and overnight a slew of new submissions have landed (none of which by actual readers of the journal, nor will they become so even in the event you publish them—just another line on the CV). For my quarterlies, I prefer to publish longer stories including at least one novella per issue. Online lit has all but killed the full-length story, and certainly the entrée-sized novella (a shame, truly). And, honestly, who of us really can stand to sit and stare at that screen for long enough to get through such a long story. This is why we like those short bits. It’s a quick shot, and we’re done. Thanks to eReaders, I can now load those longer submissions (3.5x5 again) on my Kindle and take them with me. I can burn through a full length story (7000 words or more) while at lunch drinking my second iced tea. It’s refreshing to sit there and casually read through the submission as if it were printed paper. And, I can load several at once. When I get to the point it’s a “no,” I skip to the next and so on. And, speaking of novellas, it’s high time this nearly lost form made a comeback. The mini-novel is a fantastic thing and deserves its platform. This is it.
Cathy Day writes in her article, “The Story Problem: 10 Thoughts on Academia’s Novel Crisis,” that “The short story is not experiencing a renaissance. Our current and much-discussed market glut of short fiction is not about any real dedication to the form. The situation exists because the many writers we train simply don’t know how to write anything but short stories.” She outlines numerous problems and hurdles created by the rise of MFA workshops in regard to the much bemoaned but not exactly proven “Death of the Novel.” She argues that long-form fiction is going the way of the dodo largely because such forms are not “taught” in the creative writing classroom, nor are they much published by the literary journals and small presses. We’ve whittled ourselves down to the flash fiction and short-short because that is what we perceive people will read online. Those people being, essentially, us.
This is, essentially, the problem we face as university-trained creative writers and publishers: we are the only audience we know, and we are used to quickly reading very short, exceedingly short, can we make it any shorter, short stories. We are accustomed to the workshop method. But the question that needs asking is: If the Kindle is now the best-selling single unit item in Amazon.com history, who are these avid e-reading people, and, moreover, how do we market to them?
With universal formats such as PDF, a journal press need not worry about being locked in to a single device platform, either.
The end result of all this is that the small press and journal press industry now stands at a crossroads of a new age of literacy and literary technology. Our outdated print journal and obscure online flash prose sites are now able to completely reinvent themselves utilizing these new platforms and technologies. We should no longer be marketing strictly to ourselves sitting at our laptops, or to those few of us who can afford the subscription prices for a full host of printed journals. Our potential readers are out there, devices at the ready, stuck in line at the airport, or the salon, etc. and are at least interested in giving our material a fighting chance, which is about as much as anyone can ask for.
References
Adams, Richard. “Amazon’s eBook Sales Eclipse Paperbacks For the First Time” The Guardian. January 28, 2011 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/richard-adams-blog/2011/jan/28/amazon-kindle-ebook-paperback-sales
Barthelme, Frederick, ed., BLIP Magazine. http://blipmagazine.net
Day, Cathy. “The Story Problem: 10 Thoughts on Academia’s Novel Crisis” The Millions. January 18, 2011. http://www.themillions.com/2011/01/the-story-problem-10-thoughts-on-academias-novel-crisis.html
Shannon, Christopher, Eric Smith, Saara Raappana, et al. eds., Cell Poems. http://cellpoems.org/
Stuart, Jason, Robert Bunce & Joshua Gray, eds., Burnt Bridge. http://burntbridge.net
