I heard that the golden age for short stories was long past. I don't know how true that is with digital publishing being so popular, what's your take on this?
Bullshit. Reports of the death of the short story are indeed premature. If anything, there are signs of a resurgence in the rise of flash fiction and microfiction, perfectly suited to an Internet culture of short attention spans.
I Just bought 1 short story and 3 novellas that were recently published--two of which received hardcovers. So no, I agree with Cog--I don't think short fiction is going anywhere. Edit: Also, there is a short story collection from a bunch of famous fantasy authors coming out soon. I forgot what it's called, though.
There are contemporary authors with short story collections. And I picked up one the other day by Raymond Carver.
People still read short stories, but the number of print magazines that accept short stories keeps shrinking, mainly because people don't buy magazines like they once did. But there is a large market for short fiction on the internet. If you write short stories and are persistent, there's probably plenty of room for you in one or the other of those markets.
I have to agree with this. The golden age was way back when guys like Chekhov and Maupassant were still alive. That being said, I don't think the short story market is dead. Plenty of magazines accept short stories, and there are new short story writers being published all the time.
In terms of posting on a blog, no, short stories would probably be better. For selling, you can sell them for a dollar in the Amazon Kindle store, but people rage about that because there's full novels for a doller, and writers can't compete and customers rage. It would probably work well to combine short stories into a book before selling them.
Creepypasta.com: paranormal and horror microfiction, apparently. Might be a good venue for your 50 worders, blackstar.
Free online horror short stories. Most are tongue-in-check or just plain rubbish, but there are a few good ones out there.
I sold a short story last December. It was published in February. I don't think the market is dead, at all.
So far my best seller is a 4,000 word short story for $1.99. I've had 1-2% returns (seems to be about average for any e-book), but no-one has complained. However, it is clearly marked as a short story and not a novel, and you're still better off selling a story to a pro market magazine or anthology first if you can.
Not sure what you mean. Amazon let anyone return an e-book for a full refund within seven days of buying it; somewhere between 1-2% of the people who've bought that one have returned it, which is about the same rate as other writers have reported for their e-books.
Sorry, I read that wrong, my bad. I was wondering how much money you made with the story. Since I am interested in using Amazon myself. Also, that is kind of crazy. A seven day return policy? I could read a book then return it in that amount of time.
I just counted 32 magazines paying professional rates and currently accepting submissions on one of the market sites dedicated to Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror. So in that genre, at least, there are still a lot of markets accepting work. Some are print, some are online. I see short stories at Smashwords and Amazon, but won't pay $1.00 for them, not when I can get an anthology of Pros for the same price.
$1.99 only gives you 35%, unfortunately. So about $0.70 per sale. Some other sites pay a higher percentage at that price level, but don't sell as many copies. I believe it's 30 days for physical items? Amazon ban people who repeatedly buy and return e-books, so it's not really a big deal, and the policy encourages people to buy because they know they can always get their money back if they don't like the book after all.
Amazon is a good distribution service for ebooks. Their company Createspace is also good because you can sell the print books directly on Amazon and let them take care of it, similar to the ebooks.
