The Short Story Project, Part 3 — The Good News

Now that we’ve looked at The Sad News, The Bad News, let’s explore “The Good News.”

THE POTENTIAL AUDIENCE IS BIGGER

The very fact that the world is over-populated means that, theoretically, an author’s potential to grab an audience is much bigger. This is especially true as the technology becomes more and more affordable and accessible.

Even if we just look at the numbers in the U.S., there are 96 million readers, of which at least one-third do read short stories and more who could be influenced to read them who can be reachable via the Internet or by modest advertising efforts. These folks are our main focus. But the potential is much greater if we can stimulate curiosity and a desire to explore reading as entertainment.

THE NEED TO PRODUCE MORE STORIES TO BE SCRIPTED FOR CABLE TELEVISION AND DVD IS HUGE

Entertainment has become something expected, even needed, in our modern world. And in first and even second world cultures, for many that means television, movies on DVD, and the Internet. In the U. S., some schools require watching Discovery and the History Channel as part of their curriculum. Mom’s and Dad’s use the television as a baby-sitter…which means programs developed for that audience. Mom and Dad watch, too, but they want content that stimulates and pleases them. HBO movies…DVDs — huge audience numbers pay for cable-delivered content and Netflix, paying subscription fees to gain access to their viewing content. Well, someone has to conceive and create that content — authors and script writers.

THE BEST NEWS

READING FICTION IS COMING BACK IN STYLE

Yes, it’s true. Maybe because the experience is unique and personal, keying a very specific and rich experience that can’t be attained any other way except by the visually assimilated word; maybe because of the need to escape the saturation of too much hyper-sensory overload as delivered by television, videos, and movies. That’s the best news yet.

D. L. Keur, The Deepening

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I’ve talked about the “sad news” with The Short Story Project (Part 1), let’s look at the problems, or “bad news,” before looking at the good news and beginning to explore possible solutions.

THE BIGGEST, BADDEST NEWS IS…

People want free content. They want whatever they can get for nothing. It’s human nature. But people will pay for content and products that they feel have value to them.

Providing content for free means that advertising dollars, ancillary product sales, and donations have to fill the gap. Creating a product that people will pay for requires getting the market’s attention, though, and that, of course, costs time, money, and energy/effort.

Bottom line: In order to generate income for the creators and producers of a product or content, money has to come in the door somehow, someway. Of course, there’s the reality of consumer economics — how many people make enough money to have the discretionary income to support paying for content and products. The smaller that demographic, the smaller and smaller becomes the potential market pool.

PROBLEMS PUBLISHING A SHORT STORY MAGAZINE OR EZINE

So getting operating capital (money) is the number one problem and contributes to every other problem facing the short story publisher.

Vetting short story submissions takes skill, knowledge, and time. That means that someone who has a solid grasp of what makes a short story good (called an editor) has to read and approve or reject each author’s short story submission. Editors have to eat and pay their bills, so they can’t spend time doing something that offers no return.

Getting and retaining income is the biggest problem. A magazine can’t pay for editors and office staff, publication, copyrighting costs, and overhead, never mind paying authors, if they don’t have some sort of income. Advertising is tough to get without an established subscriber base, so the project runs in a deficit until a subscriber base can be established. To get that subscriber base, requires advertising and soliciting, all of which costs more out-of-pocket money. Again, it comes down to paying staff and contributors enough to let them pay their bills and put food on the table.

There. That’s the tip of the iceberg. And it boils down to one thing: money. The question, then, becomes, can short stories generate enough money to support their creators and producers. Let’s look at some of the solutions available to authors

AMAZON’S KINDLE — A POSSIBLE SOLUTION THAT HOLDS A HUGE PITFALL

Amazon’s Kindle and similar e-formats offer one alternative — let the buyers pick and choose the winners and losers. The problem with this is that good literature goes wanting and only authors and content with friends or an established fan-base win. Popularity has never been a guarantee of quality, though. In fact, quality products usually aren’t those which prove most popular in the marketplace. (Porn is an excellent example of this fact. It’s very popular and reaps a high financial reward for its purveyors because a lot, and I mean a LOT as in billions, of people are willing to pay for it.)

AUTHOR COOPERATIVES AND ANTHOLOGIES

Author cooperative ventures which produce magazines, books, and anthologies, have all the problems associated with magazine publishing and book publishing…and more, usually because the project lacks of a good, reputable editor. Advertising the resulting publication — getting the word out — is an huge obstacle unless at least one author has an established audience or somebody has very deep pockets to pay the tens of thousands to millions of dollars needed to grab national and international audiences in the quantities necessary to make a profit.

SO THE GOOD NEWS IS…

There is still a market for short stories. There are still ways to succeed as an author of short stories. I’ll be looking at some of the good news in my next installment of The Short Story Project.

Now that we’ve looked at The Sad News, Let’s look at The Bad News.

Then we explore “The Good News” in short story publishing.

Continue reading about The Short Story Project, Part 2

I still get a lot of emails as well as a lot of submissions via email, requesting publication in The Deepening. Well, the fiction magazine, ISSN 1559-7733, that was The Deepening for a year and some months, has suspended publication. I’m sorry I don’t respond, but, after having had a few non-productive conversations via email when informing a submitting author that we’re no longer publishing, I decided that silence might be the best option.

So what about The Deepening that was? What about its short stories and its authors?

While The Deepening fiction magazine was a complete success as a short story and serialized novel venue with some really, really great authors contributing, some very solid content that I think was top notch, thanks to great submissions and excellent work on the part of its hard-working editorial team, it was, likewise, a complete financial failure. Quite honestly, it just wasn’t fair to those authors to tie up excellent stories for no pay, and it wasn’t fair to the editors to have to work so hard for nothing. It also wasn’t fair to my bank account, nor to my health, costing me a great deal of misery and infirmity.

It is a real fact that we lost money (a lot of money), rather than made any on the venture, mainly because people just aren’t willing to pay for online content. That said, we had an excellent, excellent, top-rated fiction magazine with superb authors contributing to its pages. The fault lay, not with our online fiction magazine, its owner, staff, editors, or authors, but rather with the reality of our times and the place that short stories have or don’t have in our lives.

My belief? I think maybe short stories in audio format could and would work on the Internet, but only if those audio files were top quality, performed with professional readers. But would folks pay to listen to those stories? I don’t know.

So what about reading? And what about markets for short story authors? Especially good paying markets?

People read books for pleasure, yes. Do they read short stories for pleasure? Yes…sometimes…like in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Good Housekeeping…. They will read one story amidst real life news, travel, informational, opinion, factual, and how-to articles — one short story slipped in between to provide a brain break, an entertainment moment’s possibility for relaxation while on the train, waiting in the doctor’s office, or flying…if there isn’t a TV, computer, or video available, that is.

So what about magazines devoted to fiction?

Well, there’s the genre magazines — mystery, westerns, romance, erotica, gay and lesbian, and, of course, SF/Fant/Horror, to name a few. There are some devoted audiences to more eclectic, commercial, and literary fiction periodicals, too. Still, though, these are relatively small pools of people supporting limited venues that don’t even begin to support the volume of creative work that floods in their doors.

The sad facts are that there are very few good, clean, high quality, eclectic, real world and hard copy venues for short stories. (That’s what our fiction magazine was — good, clean, high quality, and eclectic.) There are even fewer pro markets that pay enough to warrant a writer’s time and effort with just a whole lot of competition for those very few slots, slots that are mostly booked up years in advance with a backlog of good stories in the files, all of them promised publication.

I don’t have an answer when it comes to how to create a venue that pays authors a living for their work without having a sponsor with deep pockets who loves a tax write-off. If the world won’t support short stories, then short stories will become scarce. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen. So what I’m going to ask you to do is to help us help short story authors and the magazines which print those short stories and serializations (both online and real world) stay in business so that fiction authors can eat, and the magazines which print their stories can pay their bills and their staff. That way, if another venture opens up, one like ours used to be, it can thrive, and so can its editors and authors.

I look at the problems, or “bad news,” in Part 2 of The Short Story Project before looking at the good news and beginning to explore possible solutions in Part 3 of The Short Story Project.

Continue reading about The Short Story Project