Short Stories vs Novels

A quick look at Amazon shows 3,500 out of the 29,000 short stories are by a single author. However, short stories are easy to read and digest. When it comes down to the question of marketing success, the short story approach might look a little more appealing. After reading books upon books, won’t the publisher rather spend time reading and critiquing 5,000 words rather than 50,000?

    Recently, I’ve gotten into the habit of writing short stories, only because of the lack of time I have to write. I’ve found writing short stories has taught me to condense my stack of ideas and organize them in such a way so that only the best are presented to my readers. Writing a short story that would attract a wider audience was like following a simple formula:

 (time taken to write the story) x (effectiveness of the story) = Level of Reader Interest 

    Of course, the more time spent writing the story, or the more effective the story is, the greater your result will be (which is the level of reader interest!). If you want to impress your reader and gain a greater audience, you’ll have to spend more time on your story and make sure it has effective characters, plots, and themes. The more pages in your book, the more time you’ll have to take to make sure that each of those pages are effective enough (otherwise, effectiveness goes down, and just by looking at the formula, level of reader interest will decrease if the effectiveness is decreased).
    And this is why I’ve started to enjoy writing short stories. Fewer pages means less time, and usually, less time means less effort will be put into the effectiveness. However, this is why I’ve learned how to increase the effectiveness of a story. By spending less time writing and reviewing my entire story (because it is much shorter), I have decreased the time portion of the formula, but have worked extra hard on the effectiveness side of the formula, so that my readers’ levels of interest can go up without having to require so much time out of my schedule on the story.
    Such can apply to the readers too: less time can be spent reading a book while more pleasure is received from the book. Is this why short stories may be more appealing to some publishers out there? Not always. Not all short stories have the effectiveness needed to balance out the formula.
 
    In the end, it doesn’t exactly matter whether you are writing 5 pages or 500. What matters is the way you use your time and create effectiveness into writing your story—and how much you, as a writer, are getting out of it.