Market for short stories?

Outburst

Hello,

Could anyone tell me if there is much of a market for short stories? I'm working on a longish one at the moment (perhaps its a novelette), which I expect will run to about 15 - 20,000 words.

Given that a short novel might run to at least 60K words, would I be as well to try to write 3-4 thematically similar stories of roughly the same lenght, and package them as a novel length publication? Or are there publishers who deal specifically with short stories, taking submissions from various authors and publishing them together?

Any help would be appreciated!

Outburst

EileenG

Oddly enough, the internet is often a good market for short stories. There seem to be a lot of on-line publishers who want short stories or even novellas for instant download sites.

Outburst

Thanks Eileen. Do you think they would just pay peanuts tho?

EileenG

Often a flat percentage of sales, which can be better than what you'd get for print books. But it does depend on where you sell it and how many people buy your story.

Outburst

I see and thanks for the info. Do you know of any good companies?

EileenG

You know what you write, so look for companies that take that sort of thing. I know the ones that I'm interested in, but they are probably not the ones you want.

bigsmokewriting

It's usually pretty difficult to sell a book of short stories to a publisher unless you've made a name with a few of them already (e.g. they've appeared in prestigious publications or have won competitions - there are a decent amount of short story competitions out there which may be worth looking into, btw).

Outburst

I've spent about 6 hours looking into sites which offer online publishing. Many only deal with longer stories and most are poorly designed. A good deal of them have waiting lists of over a year to get publication.

I found two which seemed to be better than the rest, www.smashwords.com and www.podiobooks.com. In the former you can upload a story instantly, set the price of your work, and you receive a decent percentage of the sell price. The latter records your book into audio format, and offers 75% of the monies received, but operates on the basis of donations. Might be useful for little known or unpublished authors to get their foot in the door.

EileenG

Useful to know. Are they only for short stories, or do they take longer work?

Outburst

I'm not certain about pod, but smashwords.com also deals with longer stories across a large variety of genres. Also seems to cover non-fiction.