I’m faced with a self-inflicted conundrum and I’m not sure how to lick it. I simply adore random story collections. So much so, that each night in my after-hour publisher pajamas, I shuffle through several rough manuscript drafts and bounce from piece to piece; it would be fair to say that these disparate volumes of literature are keeping me up at night. Not only because they’re so delectable to read, but because I’m worried that my abnormal passion for collections—and my desire to discover new writers through the compilation of their short, inventive works—will spell my financial ruin.
As an avid reader and collector of books, I have an unnatural affinity toward short fiction, as strong and anomalous, you might say, as one who has a fetish for pink flamingos (John Waters, you go girl! ) or creepy purple dinosaurs (yes, Barney, I mean you). I’m not sure exactly when or how this rabid interest in story collections began, but I recall that in my indie bookselling days (1995-1999), many story collections that made their way into my store stayed in my store until I either took them home or finally unloaded them for pennies on the dollar.
It would stand to reason then that any level-headed publisher who had tried and earnestly failed to hand-sell story collections (on the floor of his own bookshop, mind you) certainly would not allow his intellectual tapeworm for tall tales told in expeditious form to sway future investment decisions. He’d have to be a walking P&L disaster to not learn from experience, right? Even market contrarians eventually catch drift of ferocious trade winds and set their sail cats straight with the current, right?
Oy captain, my captain, I will not fall cold and dead. (With apologies to Walt Whitman, Dylan Thomas, and Annie Lennox) Even if sweet bankruptcies are made of these, Atticus Books will not go gently into that good night until the press sells enough novels to support the publication of story collections and poetry volumes and other notoriously poor selling books of literary goodness packed with wisdom and whimsy.
It is true. I am incapable of compartmentalizing my personal life from my professional life—my leisure reading from my evaluative reading. I am stubborn (and perhaps crazy enough) to think that the market for story collections indeed will grow in this age of mass deficit disorder (so deficient in attention that you can exclude the word attention from the phrase deficit disorder and do away with commas and hardly a grammarian will notice). I especially believe there’s a place for flash fiction—or sudden fiction or micro fiction or short short stories, however you want to describe these rippling tides of experimental genius.
Flash fiction is the epitome of immediate gratification. At no time does it allow the reader to zone out. At no time does it allow for a slow-paced, steady bout of rope-a-dope while painting the reader into a corner and having him hold on for dear, desperate life. Instead, flash stands toe-to-toe with the reader and demands surefire readiness and mental acuity as it unleashes a fast and furious staccato delivery of rhythms and images. Instead of a deliberate series of verbal jabs, feints, and left hooks, flash fiction abridges the distance between writer and reader by delivering thundering punches, all registering in a swift, precise attack, a flurry of body blows crescendoing with one final death blow to the skull. Flash does not sneak up on us. It knocks us out. Unconscious. Without fanfare. In the first round. Before the ring card girl even gets to earn her keep.
In these days of mental masturbatory pursuits, in these days that are short on cerebral orgasm and much too long on staid, formulaic writing, how the hell hasn’t a publisher found a way to monetize flash fiction in the same way that Apple has monetized the digital, two-minute and 30-second pop song? Selling blocks of byte-sized content on iPads and Kindles has not gone far enough in driving consumer behavior. We need a pusher on the streets, peddling this stuff in schoolyards, meeting folks halfway down dark alleyways, roughing them up if they don’t pay up. We need a dealer who knows the value of this drug and who knows how to sell it because he understands its allure, because he’s hooked on its profundity. We need a small press entrepreneur willing to risk his dwindling savings on stashes of pure flash fiction whose volumes have grown uncontrollably in the last decade and have caused the drug lords—big publishers—to come unhinged while across the border from the houses of practical business sense, authors—suppliers of the wacky, one-hit spliff—remain unrecognized. All because we don’t know how to package their product and make a profit.
If we can agree that short stories are virtuous and untouchable as storytelling devices since mankind’s humble cave scrawling beginnings, then surely we can agree that flash fiction is more than just the equivalent of 21st-century literature’s bling. What any identity crisis needs is a marketing plan, a branding initiative, a way to communicate its buzz-worthy existence and grab notice with flash and eloquence. Try these slogans on for size:
Flash fiction: More than costume jewelry.
Flash fiction: No longer an ornament of pride to be worn as a decorative accessory at the queen’s parade.
Flash fiction: Fast becoming today’s crown jewel.
Once a mere sideshow attraction amid more serious works of literature, flash now has staying power both online and off. It steals the show at readings and often lights up Google Analytics by way of virtual foot traffic on websites. Since much of flash actually addresses real life issues (granted, sometimes in abstract, mind-twisting fashion), it usually does not defy categorization. For publishers bent on cohesion, it is rather easy to put together a burst of theme-oriented flash for a journal issue (or a section in a book).
While some publishers are banishing the practice of accepting story collection submissions (for sound economic reasons), it may be shortsighted of them to dismiss the craft of short fiction when half the reading population will forget where it parked its car this evening and the other half isn’t sure if they unplugged the coffee machine after they left the house for work.
In other words, because this publisher has acquired the rights to three new story collections for 2012 with more under consideration for 2013, many in my profession indeed will think I am plainly bonkers to believe that any one of these volumes will break even (or, gasp, make one red cent). They won’t. Their path to fruitlessness can almost be assured. But there’s something to be said for a publisher’s persistence even when his hunch (and addiction) may conjure up the vision of a crack pipe falling out of the pocket of a white-collar employee standing outside the office of Human Resources.
Sustainable book publishing business models may or may not be made of story-filled flash drives. But paper and postage costs alone compel us to seek alternate solutions. The current environment requires an against-the-grain, intuitive mentality and innovation far beyond the static electricity of words on a page.
It could get ugly for linear thinking traditionalists whose main purpose is to protect the status quo. The appearance of a crack dealer in a nice, suburban neighborhood invariably calls for the beheading of a few authority figures—and it seems high time the dues-paying residents of the publishing community threw chivalry to the wind and rallied for a changing of the guard. It’s about time we organize a flash mob and administer a coup de grâce before long-winded rhetoric takes over our planet.
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CURRENTLY ON MY NIGHTSTAND
Individual short story collections
Coronado by Dennis Lehane
How They Were Found by Matt Bell (Keyhole Press)
The Bigness of the World by Lori Ostlund
For Sale by Owner by Kelcey Parker (Kore Press)
Pictures of Houses with Water Damage by Michael Hemmingson (Black Lawrence Press)
Anthologies
The Best American Short Stories 2010, edited by Richard Russo
Baseball: A Literary Anthology, edited by Nicholas Dawidoff
Stress City, edited by Richard Peabody (Paycock Press)
Photo Source: WD Fyfe
Love this essay & included it in my own last blog post in honor of my own last flash story for a while anyway. You make me feel like a bloody blogging hack writer. If I didn’t want to write novels, I’d be jealous.
Otherwise, I do agree on the growing importance and commercial potential of flash fiction—the belligerent note at the end, the war cry on behalf of flashers worldwide is much appreciate by this krautflasher. Perhaps it really is time to think of fiction (especially online) as an “app”, as something that travels light and fast & doesn’t linger.
Frankly, I do see as much merde in the flash fiction slush pile as in any other pile of prose or poetry. You said it yourself: we live in “days of mental masturbatory pursuits”, an approach that infects all creative production. Flash fiction, however, is like fruitflies: there is so much more of it that it can, and will, evolve much more quickly than other forms of fiction. It’s poetry for the road, a nicotine patch for the dirt path, much needed and increasingly sought after, which is why I think, as long as you stick with the quality that you already have under your roof, you’ll live & even thrive. Good luck, and as a marketing motto, I suggest, turning back to Joyce, “Flash Fiction—No More Silence, Exile, and Cunning.” Perhaps. I suck at slogans.