And I like big things
the size of them impresses me
[Styx]
I’ve been told that – when it comes to ebook pricing – selling anything shorter than 100 pages for 99 cents is, basically, shortchanging the readers.
I find the idea somewhat silly, especially when, to support it, I am told that generally speaking short fiction can’t be as good as long fiction.
Quite simply, I’ve been told, there’s not room enough, in a short story, to tell a good, satisfying tale.
Now this of course is incredibly stupid – it denies the worth of sort fiction by claiming that word-count equals quality.
Following this theory, we should have no problem choosing the best book in a bookshop – just buy the thickest, and you’re all set.
Oh, if it’s a novel, of course – God forbid some sneaky author or cheating publisher pushes on you a thick collection of short stories.
Also, should we follow this theory, we should come to the conclusion that nothing published in the field of Science Fiction before, say, 1970 -with the possible exceptions of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and Leiber’s The Wanderer, and maybe Frank Herbert’s Dune – was on a par with most of what was published afterwards.
And don’t we even start talking about those authors that published mostly short fiction throughout their careers.
Frauds, every single one of them.
Except, of course, a few “inspired geniuses.”
I wonder whence such ideas come from?
Is it all those dubious, massive “sagas” that infest the Fantasy section of chain bookstores?
Is it a short-circuit caused by the veneration of The Lord of the Rings?
And again, is The Lord of the Rings a wonderful 1800+ pages novel, or three not so great 600 pages novels, each one of them however better than that sucky 400 pages Silmarillion, and the really bad more-or-less-100 pages Farmer Giles of Ham?
Or maybe it is just personal taste (“I like big things”) elevated to absolute truth, as often happens on the web.
This kind of reasoning scares me – I really hope it’s just an excuse to cover the true issue… basically, “I don’t want to pay 99 cents for a novelette”.
Stinginess I can understand.
Word-count as quality I can’t.
Karavansara 
22 November 2014 at 02:00
And what about those stories, sometimes very short, that stay in mind for days?
It happens to me especially with really good Sci-Fi short stories, they are like a bang, they resonate and make me think for a lot of time!
Actually for me the quality parameter is not how long is the story but how long the story stays with me after I finished it.
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22 November 2014 at 14:08
There is certainly a lot of ways we can evaluate the quality of a story – the word count is not one of these.
For instance, I like stories that suggest me other stories – whether they do it in three pages or three hundred is of no consequence.
Nor is the cents-per-page a sane discriminating factor.
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22 November 2014 at 19:51
The whole core of this argument seemed to me utterly bullshit yeasterday evening, and with a day’s worth of distance, the bullshit in it seems even more copious.
The sad things are that the gal starting the “discussion” couldn’t see where her whole argument shortcircuited on itself; and that the same gal couldn’t understand why some people felt a little bit (sarcasm here!) offended by the equations “short stories = fraud” and “author of short stories = con man hidden behind a thin veil of respectability”.
The fact she could have gone on and on for the next century and counting repeating the same trite silliness, well, it didn’t make the situation any better
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22 November 2014 at 19:53
And yet, I fear this is not an isolated case – there’s something eating at the brains of the readers, obsessing them with “parameters” and other pseudo-technical rubbish, and distracting them from plain enjoying the story.
This will get worse, I fear.
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22 November 2014 at 20:00
Your fears are mine too. This “parameter” thing has a long story, and it will not die easily. It’s the sort of strangling weed that will kill you (or your ability to enjoy the freakin’ story instead of dissecting it and its value) silently while you’re too distracted by the search for objectivity.
We need mental napalm, a lot of it.
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