Short Stories and the UK Small Press

• Fewer story collections are published
• Fewer mainstream magazines print stories - woman's magazines in particular have been affected.
• Fewer fiction-only non-genre magazines exist - In the UK there's only Riptide and short Fiction. Working on the assumption that writers subscribe to magazines that they appear in, fiction magazines are going to attract fewer subscribers than poetry magazines will, and will struggle to survive.

• Alice Munro won the International Man Booker prize
• Deborah Kay Davies won the Wales Book of the Year Award 2009

but they're rare exceptions and seem to have no trickle-down effect. Attempts have been made to get contributors to subsidize publication. At least one small press I know thinks that this is the only viable means of publishing stories nowadays

• Cadenza magazine only printed stories that succeeded in their competitions. Aesthetica now does likewise. Glimmer Train in the US is similar, I think
• Salt are running The Scott Prize story collection competition where the winning entries are published (45,000 words, deadline 31st October)
• HappenStance are running a short story competition (2500 words, deadline 9th August)

• "The number of collections published by mainstream publishers has fallen significantly, but the number of collections published by the independents (including self-publishing) has increased"
• "Despite the fact that over half of all short story titles published were by independents, virtually all of the top 100 short story bestsellers for 2002 were from mainstream publishers, and most were written by novelists"
• "Small presses tend to offer similar advances for short story collections and novels, and sales of collections can be amongst the bestselling titles for this group"
• "Small presses experience more success comparatively with short story collections, and collections are often amongst their bestselling titles"

Amongst the small presses they had in mind were

• Biscuit Publishing
• Comma Press - which has an emphasis on the short story
• Salt Publishing - they say that story collections are harder to sell than poetry collections. I think a contributing factor is that poetry collections are easier to sell at readings.
• Tindal Street Press
• Parthian (Wales)

But small presses are feeling the pinch at the moment. The long-term solution, again, might be the WWW. Elizabeth Baines in her Short is beautiful article mentions short story webzines like Pulp.net, East of the Web, and Storyglossia. In From Page to Pixels: The Evolution of Online Journals in "Poets & Writers" Sandra Beasley writes that "The barriers are coming down. Selections from online magazines are now regularly included in the Best American Series of annual anthologies. Online editors can nominate their contributors for the Pushcart Prize. The National Endowment for the Arts permits up to half of one's qualifying publishing credits to be from online journals"

Maybe short stories stand to gain the most from this revolution. Sites like Everyday Fiction exploit the medium by allowing reader comments and voting.

Discussion Points

• My impression is that the US markets are distorted by University-subsidized journals. Is the climate for short stories healthier in the US? Are there small presses in the States that focus on short stories?
• In 2006, Picador published a series of 12 booklets called "Shots". Costing £1, each contained a story or two. In 2008 they published 8 more, this time at £1.99 each. I didn't buy any. Would you?