1) Nobody reads Kindle Singles. You'll notice there's no metrics anywhere on anything listed. 2) Nobody reads short fiction. None of the short fiction sites where actual fiction is traded and sold are even mentioned. /r/nosleep? Gimme a fuckin' break. I actually discussed short fiction with my agent yesterday. I'd mentioned that I had a bunch of screenplays doing nothing, but that I could probably turn 'em into novellas or short stories or whatever, as well as a lot of the ideas I've been developing with a few different producer buddies. I asked her if I should spend the time. Kindle Singles never even came up. She said that it certainly couldn't hurt, so long as I didn't lose my focus on what mattered (novels). Know what my mentor said when I talked to him about self-publishing? Tor has some short fiction for free but that's mostly to build brand and give authors a proving ground. Sea change? Hardly. This article quotes that tedious fucking Future of the Internet survey whereby Pew cherry-picked a bunch of "experts" and asked them leading questions. It's about as scientific as asking Jim Kramer what stocks he likes 8 years from now.Amazon is uploading something like 250,000 self pubbed ebooks a month, and for every Hugh Howey there are a million ebooks that sell fifty copies and all to people with your same last name.
There exist people making a living writing mostly short fiction. I gather people who do it are putting in a lot of work for not very much money, but there has to be some kind of market for them to make their not very much money from.2) Nobody reads short fiction.
I do! I'm not going to call it a guilty pleasure but I love sites like this because yeah, there's going to be a lot of garbage, but there is also a lot of sci-fi gold. I'm also a big fan of those massive short-story anthologies that get put out every year with titles like 'Best Short Sci-Fi of 20XX' or 'Masters of Horror Short Stories 20XX.' I've seen a lot of great stuff from pretty big name authors, little insights into their mainstream universes (Game of Thrones, Neil Gaiman stuff like American Gods, for those who like Gaiman) or a whole different side to their writing. 2) Nobody reads short fiction.
Right - so you appreciate the best-ofs, the things that have already culled the chaff, and you enjoy the "DVD Extras" of the big series. That's hardly the "rise of short fiction." I know a guy who makes between 10 and 40k a month on kindle short fiction. He's got a posse of maybe 8 other people doing the same thing. but they're it. There are still pop music stars, too, but they don't have the reach they did 20 years ago. And speaking as someone who had an Analog subscription from 1988-1994 and again from 2008-2009, I'm here to tell ya - "rising" ain't what it's doing.
I guess the word 'Rising' has to mean something new in the hyperdigital age. Growth of a certain kind as an industry is just a sign of normal functioning as your product/organization reaches a larger audience in total numbers. Basically, while the percentage of the population that pays for your product/service/widget in relation to the population that have known about it stays the same. 'Rising' then as a more meaningful term should mean a larger viewer/user/reader-ship as a percentage of the population that has seen/knows about your work. Am I making sense?
Kind of. But short fiction isn't "rising" by any metric you can come up with. There isn't more of it, what's available isn't better, and authors aren't making more money for it. I say this as someone who writes short fiction, reads short fiction, and has attempted to earn money with short fiction. The market is smaller than it was, the audience less dedicated and the sources for remuneration ever scarcer. Yeah, there's a million people on /r/nosleep but apparently this chowderhead didn't know that nosleep was an offshoot from 4chan was an offshoot from newsgroups was an offshoot from the pulp traders of old. I'll take a 'zine over markup any day, but I can't anymore.
I think that's a matter of both opinion and culling. Completely true. Supply far exceeds demand. So you would consider nosleep and similar venues the spiritual descendant of those pulp traders?what's available isn't better,
and authors aren't making more money for it
nosleep was an offshoot from 4chan was an offshoot from newsgroups was an offshoot from the pulp traders of old.