“The Short Story is Not Dead.” This headline appeared in The Nervous Breakdown in January above an essay written by my friend Alex Chee in which he discussed the ways that technology was making the short story more accessible, and specifically, accessible on his iPhone. The assertion of the negative – not dead – seemed to me an odd way for the copy editor to introduce an article on good news for short story reading. I wondered what he meant by the possible ‘death’ of the story. I find that when someone asserts that a thing (the story), or an idea (God), is not dead, they usually mean that a nostalgic version of the thing has lapsed and not been replaced by something comparably satisfying.
What has changed with the story? Not the writing. Short story writing is alive and well. The evidence: Three of five of the New York Times’ notable works of fiction in 2010 are short fiction collections (counting Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad). And consider all the print and online journals that survive on paid contest submissions, which is evidence of the large number of writers who aspire to be published authors. The human impulse to tell stories has not diminished.
What then? Short story reading has declined. With few exceptions (The New Yorker is one), mass circulation general interest magazines no longer publish short stories. And, editors and agents blanche at the prospect of debut story collections, and often publish an author’s collection only with the promise of a follow-on novel. The popular wisdom – and commercial reality – is that story collections don’t sell.
What to make of this conundrum? Is today’s short fiction not as good? Hardly. Why aren’t readers holding up their part of the bargain? The answer, let me suggest, is related to how readers are given the opportunity to read – distribution, in commercial terms. The short story became one of the great 20th century art forms when inexpensive publishing technology gave rise to mass market general interest magazines. Oral story telling is a deeply human tradition, but it was only with the blitzkrieg of 19th century mass publishing that the written short story became a specific art form. Magazines served up stories as snacks for readers, and did so with relish.
The Saturday Evening Post, and other widely circulated magazines, provided outlets for stories by writers with now-household names, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, There were more than 25 mass market magazines in the 1920s and 1930s that published one short story each week. When Life magazine published Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, in 1952, that issue sold 5.3 million copies.
Stories in magazines could be read in one sitting. And, story collections became the publishing industry’s way to capitalize on already popular works when they were repackaged in compilations. Poe’s, Chekhov’s, Hawthorne’s, Gallant’s, Updike’s, and Cheever’s great stories all first appeared in periodicals. Only later in books.
The decline in short story reading is, I suggest, linked to the precipitous decline in mass market magazine readership. Magazines’ sales decline began in during the 1960s when consumers shifted their entertainment and news interest to television, but the decline recently accelerated with the explosive growth of online and mobile real-time access to news and information. The story, which was popularized by new printing and distribution technologies, has slowly become a victim of the displacement of those technologies. To be sure, stories themselves also suffer from the crushing competition for consumer’s attention posed by TV, video games, and the Internet. But, without mass market distribution outlets, readers entertain themselves in other ways.
Literary journals continue to publish stories, but they come out seasonally, or occasionally, and the months’ long gap between issues doesn’t serve a creature of time-worn habit, accustomed to weekly soap operas, weekly television dramas, or the weekly story in The New Yorker. Consumers like predictable engagement. There are hundreds of online literary journals that publish bi-weekly, or monthly. Many — and there are a great many for readers to discover — are better suited to launch new voices than to publish top authors. And the seductive distractions of Facebook and Twitter make literary reading on a computer a difficult act of will. What’s a reader to do? Technology gave rise to the flowering of the short story, contributed to its decline, and technology will, in my opinion, again solve the problem of connecting readers and stories.
Like the song, the short story is perfectly suited for mobile consumption. The iPhone and iPad and other tablets are with their owner all the time, and a story on these devices can be read on a treadmill, in a bank line, on an airplane, wherever the user has a few minutes and wants to be transported to the magical place stories can create. Poe’s definition of the short story remains as true today as when he wrote it: “a story is a thing that can be read in one sitting.” If he were writing today he might rephrase it: “…in one hour on the tread mill.”
So, how many Americans actually read short stories? How large is the market? There are no accurate answers to the question, but there are ways of approximating the number who read, which of course, is reduced by the fact that many people who might like to read stories don’t know where to find them. A few facts:
9 million adult Americans annually read more than 50 works of fiction (NEA study, 2008).
2 million adult American publish personal creative writing (NEA study, 2002; writers are usually also readers.)
1.1 million: the subscription rate base for The New Yorker in 2009
150,000: the graduates of creative writing MFA programs in the past 20 years (all of whom learn to write and read short stories).
50,000-100,000: the estimated annual sales of The Pushcart Prize collections of stories (my estimate).
These population snapshots overlap, of course, but suggest that there are 500,000-to-1.5 million American adults who are frequent readers of short stories.
Stories are meant to be read one at a time, savored individually, taken in, and reflected upon. Collections are ways of repackaging known works. Publishing executives today don’t expect collections to sell (because they haven’t in the past), so they aren’t marketed, and this cycle of low expectations and insufficient care creates a self-fulfilling outcome: collections don’t sell.
Web connected devices, like the iPad and the iPhone, can connect readers of short fiction with the best writing in the market. Mobile and web technologies reduce friction in markets. Storytelling is a deep human need, and readers of stories are entertained and instructed by clever plots, sympathetic characters, and artful writing. Words create imaginary worlds that provide readers with an experience that is similar to, but different from, the worlds of movies and television. Technology provides a new way to connect story tellers and fans. We’re all ears.
(Image: 732 – Power Grid – Pattern image from zooboing’s photostream)
Newspaper ads don't sell books, mostly those ads are in there to gratify the egos of the authors, and, sometimes, editors. But there are plenty of branded companies out there who would love the demographics of the Book Review section—the ad sales folks shouldn't be looking to the people who happen to produce the objects discussed, but rather be looking at the consumers of the section and figuring out who, of the comanies seeking that demographic, has got the most money…
I utterly agree with Richard. The Book Reviews should not be looking to advertise books at all – people already reading have clearly, an interest in books and will buy what their tastes dictate! Instead, review sections should gun for banks, car companies, hedge funds, pitch their product and get them to buy the advertising spaces.
I object to the 'hometown' jibe. Often, if a New York house has an author who writes for a local city publication, it makes more sense to advertise on a local 5-boro level, than throwing out a wider net.
I'm The Dallas Morning News book columnist whose departure — along with that of my book editor, Charles Ealy — prompted the AAP letter and the Publishers Weekly story.
Having read the story, I e-mailed Pat Schroeder of the AAP with the following:
The only advertising that keeps newspaper arts pages in existence is movie ads. It is highly unlikely that publishers and booksellers will ever have enough (or consistently enough) advertising budget to spend on print — enough to make a difference to newspaper publishers across the country, that is. It'd be wonderful if they did, but past experience indicates that's a futile hope.
The fact is, though, as you noted, the NFL doesn't need to buy ads to get abundant, free sports coverage — in print, on TV, radio or online. It's other advertisers who covet that football-fan audience. In contrast, advertisers see the readers of book reviews as the old and the dead. That they're actually an educated and well-off audience has not meant much to firms who primarily pursue young illiterates with poor impulse control when it comes to purchasing the latest must-have trend object. These are long-entrenched, conventional-wisdom ad strategies.
To make matters worse, printing book reviews, op-ed columns, investigative reporting, editorial cartoons — all of these money-losing services use to be the mark of a serious newspaper, one committed to educating its civic audience. But in our new cutthroat media world, all of these things are being abandoned as newspapers struggle to keep Wall Street happy with high profit margins. The Morning News jettisoned its political cartoonist two years ago.
So my suggestion to Ms. Schroeder and the AAP in general is that it would be far more effective to target your efforts not at squeezed-out newspaper publishers but at advertisers. Convince them that with an aging boomer marketplace, aiming at older readers is smart.
Slanting a little away from the 18-to-49 demographic is not some wildly unheard-of, impractical strategy. Television networks have started to come around to the undeniable fact that older people watch more TV — the kids are off at clubs and concerts or online. This is the thinking behind such new sitcoms as Twenty Good Years, for example. This is the thinking behind the 'geriatric' ads that run during news programs like 60 Minutes.
And if older people watch more TV, they certainly read more, too. So why not switch some ads to the arts pages?
Ms. Schroeder repled graciously — and agreed with much of my argument.
Jerome, your observation about Boomers hit the bullseye. 77 million people in the US alone who may or may not care where paris danced last night, but who did grow up reading. Now that CBGB is closed boomers have all sorts of free time to read.
Yet another newspaper pulling back on books, this time the Washington Post.
http://www.delmio.com/the-end-for-another-book-section/