Do Short Stories Sell?

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Some years ago, I participated in a reading event at a local bookstore. The theme was short stories. During the question and answer period, an audience member asked the bookstore owner if people bought short story collections. He answered, "No, not even when the author wins a major award." His example was the recent winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada's glitziest literary award for fiction. A Giller win typically results in a huge boost in book sales, but his customers weren't interested in buying the winner's short story collection. 

                                     Giller Prize glitz 

Short stories used to be popular. In the 1950s and 60s, writers could make a living by publishing them in magazines. When I started writing around 1990, big mainstream magazines like Redbook and Seventeen included a short story per issue. Neither magazine now publishes in print. A friend who writes short stories says that today online magazines provide many opportunities for short stories, but they often don't attract readers.

My writing has mainly focused on novels, but I got into short stories in my first creative writing class. Short works suit a class or workshop structure better than novels do. I suspect the proliferation of classes is one reason the short story genre has survived. A student can write a story in a week, the class critiques the whole work in an evening, and then the student revises and submits the story to journals that exist to publish the work of emerging writers.  

I've enjoyed writing short stories for reasons other than the relative speed from start to completion. They've been a chance to experiment with styles, characters and locations I couldn't sustain in a novel. I've written short stories with magic realism, a sociopathic narrator, and settings I've visited but don't know intimately. Other stories have led to novels. My series mystery sleuth, Paula Savard, had her origins in my short story, Adjusting the Ashes, about an adjuster dealing with a wacky insurance claim. 

The best explanation I've heard for the decline in short story readership is that television killed it. People in the mood for a short fictional experience have the option to relax with an evening drama or comedy. I'm guilty of choosing these over reading. I wonder if short story writing has responded to the drop in readership by shifting away from popular fiction toward a poetic style that appeals to fellow writers, but tends to be less satisfying to general readers.  

A short story exception that proves the rule is Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam. Sales of this book took off after it won the 2006 Giller Prize. A literary pundit noted that the collection of linked stories about medical students got the Giller bump because the writing is accessible, the characters relatable and the stories are strong on plot. Another exception is E. Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, a long short story that had enough going on for it to be adapted into a hit movie, although I don't know how many people read this excellent short story.  

My home province of Alberta, Canada, played the role of Wyoming in the movie, Brokeback Mountain

Enterprising authors say the practical value of short stories today is to use them to draw readers to your novels. You can produce and sell a short story e-book online for 99 cents or offer it for free. If readers enjoy the story, hopefully, it will lead them to buy your novels. I'd like to try this one day with a couple of my longer works. Perhaps foolishly, I would also like to gather the stories I've written and published over the years into a short story collection, even if nobody reads the book.     

Canadian-American actor Eric McCormack hosted the online Giller Prize show on                  November 6, 2020. The Will and Grace star explained that he grew his moustache for a movie.    

Souvankham Thammavongsa was surprised in her apartment when she won the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize for her short story collection, How To Pronounce Knife 

“Little Boxes” by Karla Stover

Every morning my husband and I drive out to the woods and walk our dog. There is always so much
interesting stuff to see. Like right now, mushrooms are everywhere. And all summer long wild flowers bloom, my favorites being a shrub called ocean spray and madrone, a tree native to the Pacific Coast from British Columbia to Northern California. Right now it has clusters of red berries which many birds love. However, all waxing nostalgic aside, to get to the forest, we have to drive past new housing developments. (Hear me heave a heavy sigh).

   It’s not that I don’t want people to have homes; it’s just that they all look alike; right down to the colors they are painted.  They make me harken back to a song called “Little Boxes” that my mother used to sing. A woman named Malvina Reynolds wrote it in 1962 for her friend Pete Seeger and when in 1963 he released his cover version, “Little Boxes” became a hit.

 

   The song was written as a “political satire about the development of suburbia and associated conformist middle-class attitudes. It mocks suburban tract housing as ‘little boxes’ of different colors ‘all made out of ticky-tacky’, and which ‘all look just the same.’” “Ticky-tacky" was “a reference to the shoddy material supposedly used in the construction of the houses.” I’m not saying the ones we pass were built of shoddy material, it’s just that they’re boring to look at and don’t have yards where children can play.

When the song hit the airwaves (it reached number 70 in the Billboard Hot 100), there were three opinions: a fellow satirist named satirist Tom Lehrer described it as “the most sanctimonious song ever written.” Leher probably knew whereof he spoke; his songs included, “There’s a Delta for Every Epsilon,” “The Love Song of the Physical Anthropologist” and “Dodging the Draft at Harvard.” Meanwhile, an unnamed university professor said, “I've been lecturing my classes about middle-class conformity for a whole semester. Here's a song that says it all in 1½ minutes.” And historian Nell Irvin Painter offered her thoughts, pointing out “that the conformity described in ‘Little Boxes” was not entirely a bad thing, and in the case of suburbia, “it was a sameness to be striven toward.”

 

If these comments were about writing they would” warn about conformity, (I’m reminded of the Evanovich series) scoff at piety, ( The ‘Father Tim’ books were huge hits when they came out), or embrace “sameness,” (every cozy ever written.)

Which would you choose?

  

Veteran's Day

 

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Veteran’s Day, or Remembrance Day as some countries call it, is celebrated on Nov. 11 because the Allied nations and Germany signed an armistice, or a temporary halting of hostilities during World War I, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918. Much has been written about this period of history, and many of you may have relatives who played a part, if not in WWI than in later conflicts. In today’s world, we honor not only those who fought in WWI, but all of our veterans.

My dad joined the Army Air Corp by using his brother’s birth certificate as he was too young at the time to join. After first enlisting, he later re-upped and went to Officer Candidate School and became a pilot. He flew in the Berlin Air Lift at the end of WWII, delivering supplies to blockaded Berlin. During his career he also flew missions to Vietnam and played “cat and mouse” with the Russians during the cold war. He set records for distance and speed as new transport aircraft were constantly being built. When he’d go on a mission, we never knew where or how long he’d be gone. He didn’t talk about it, and now that he has passed away, there are so many things I wish I had asked him. Not so much about where he flew, but why he risked his life; why he stayed in the Air Force for 23 years instead of returning to civilian life.

Because he had retired by the time grandkids came along, they only knew him as Grandpa Rusty, who would pile them in the back of his pickup and take them to Dairy Queen. They never knew that other part of his life. When he was perhaps 75 years old, I decided to write a creative non-fiction story about the Air Lift for his grandchildren. I had to do a lot of research and I was surprised at the amazing things those young pilots did at that time. It was hard to imagine my dad at 23 years of age, a cocky “fly boy” and quite handsome in his uniform. He flew 100 missions along a narrow corridor with anti-aircraft flac exploding on both sides of his airplane. He had little in the way of radar. The planes took off and landed only seconds apart and if for some reason they couldn’t land, they had to return to base without delivering their much needed supplies. It was an operation that people said couldn’t be done and yet ended in success.

My dad lost his vision later in life, and eventually could hardly walk, but every Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day he would be on his brother’s porch for the parade as the bands marched by. And he would say, “Tell me when the flag comes”, and when we told him, he would stand and salute.

I am so proud to be the daughter of a veteran. It’s not said often enough, but THANK YOU to all the men and women who have spent their lives in service to their country to ensure the freedoms we still enjoy today.

Barb Baldwin

http://www.authorsden.com/barbarajbaldwin

https://bookswelove.net/baldwin-barbara/