"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."
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Friday, January 7
The Future Of The Short Story
Since "Bullet" Bob Tinsley started his blog "The Short Of It", he and a lot of others around the mystery world have been talking about the future of the short story. So here's my two cents.
I don't think that print mags or anthologies are going away any time soon, but I think both will see a gradual decline in readership. Many of these readers will move to video games or DVD or whatever, but I see three new areas which I think will grab market share from the traditional venues:
1) Promotional materials. I think we'll see more short stories given away as promotional materials. In particular, I hope that Borders, Barnes and Noble, or other large resellers will start their own in-house fiction magazines, used primarily as tools to sell books. It couldn't cost more than a few thousand bucks to put together each issue (not counting printing costs), and it would be self-targeting: the people who'd pick one up are already predisposed to buy mysteries. The drawback, of course, is that the bookstore would be competing with some of its vendors, but I think the stores are big enough to get their way. And if they don't, if magazines stop selling through them, what's it really cost?
For smaller independent and specialty bookstores, I would not be surprised if someone created a small magazine that could be tailored to fit the target audience each store wants. This is the age of mass customization; printing the name, address, and logo of each store (and maybe even local advertising) would be pretty simple. I actually looked into doing this at one time - long enough to figure out it would take all my free time and would not make any money.
And I expect more authors who are looking to sell their novel-length fiction will give away little chapbooks with a short story or two, especially if the story and the book feature the same series character. Don't know if you want to buy my book? Here, try this for free. If you've got Microsoft Publisher, a local Kinko's, and a couple hundred bucks, you can print up 75 or 100 copies, and maybe sell twenty or thirty books out of it. It's worth trying, anyway.
2) Audio books. There have been books on tape for many years (and more recently on CD), but I think that if short stories become popular, it will be on various electronic devices - especially the iPod. There's already a growing movement called "podcasting", audio presentations (radio shows, readings, whatever) packaged for downloading to the iPod. I think getting your fiction this way will become more and more popular.
The aforementioned Mr. Tinsley is already forging ahead in this area, creating an audio recording of his short story "Grasshopper", in addition to some other audio projects.
3) The Web. The big one. In my opinion the World Wide Web will eventually drive down the circulations of all magazines, but especially fiction magazines. The web has a lot of advantages over print, most of them related to cost. It's fairly cheap to create a website, and once you've got your content up, the costs per reader are so low as to be nonexistent, unless your site pulls in a lot of traffic.
The problem with the web is that few sites have been able to make money. Advertising is the most common source of revenue, but it's iffy at best. Sites that rely on subscriptions have generally failed because it's just not worth it to enough people.
The Web does have a much broader reach than any print magazine could, and it makes it easy to form groups of people with similar interest - in essence, mini-fandoms.
All of these new sources of distribution have one thing in common: no one is likely to make much money off of them. If you're writing mystery short stories these days, you're generally getting something out of it besides money. Maybe you write for the fun of it, maybe for exposure that will help your career, maybe just to improve on your way to bigger and better things, but whatever the reason, it's not because short stories will make you rich.
So: corporate sponsorship, convenience, low overhead plus wide reach. The defining attributes of short story venues for the next decade.
