Why Are Short Stories Not Popular With Readers?

There is a current belief from many people, that short stories are not popular. While that's only partly true, it's worth trying to discover why this is. This article will go over some of the main misconceptions of this, and why it's changing for the better.
But before we start, it's interesting to note that it's usually authors of short stories that think this. They write a few thousand words, put up a nice cover on it, and place it on Amazon wondering why they aren't making thousands of dollars a month from their work.
When you ask readers, they actually say they love reading short stories. So what's going on?
It really comes down to what readers want, and the method they are used to receiving it.
Let's look at Amazon. Most readers have always gone there to buy books - full length books. They are not used to seeing short works on there yet. Of course that is slowly changing, but nonetheless, with the rise of independent publishing it's confusing to many readers now, to understand just what they are buying.
Traditionally, works of short length were sold to magazines, and the consumer got to read them after purchasing the magazine. They therefore thought that they were reading the story for 'free' even though it was really factored into the price of the magazine as a whole. So the idea of paying for JUST the story is quite new to them.
This is also the case when many websites have hundreds of works by writers all for free, such as the popular website WattPad. A reader can simply create an account and read as much or as little as they want for no cost.
It also doesn't help when how much a book costs has such a huge range on many online stores. Some authors are pricing their full novels for less than a dollar, and other authors are writing shorter fiction and pricing it over three dollars. Works in different genres are priced differently, and even writers of differing levels of experience have vastly different prices.
That's the reason why smaller works on places on Amazon are not as popular as full length novels. Customers are not used to buying them this way yet.
Statistics show that this is slowly changing, but it still could be quite some time before short stories become more popular and mainstream, and authors start to make a good living from their work.

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