Literary short stories don't perform well online. There's a reason for that.

Last year I wrote a series of posts about my dissatisfaction with contemporary literary fiction: I wrote about the literary hype-machine, about literary short stories, about Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain and Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, about the lack of moral vision in contemporary novels, and about how the literary landscape is dominated by two huge conglomerates that give massive advances for debut literary novels.

My contention was that big corporations often pay large amounts of money for literary novels, put huge amounts into promoting them, and rely on book critics and awards juries falling into line and delivering unanimously fawning coverage. The intent is to manufacture a must-read book that can be foisted onto book clubs across America.

The only problem is that most of these books are bad, in ways that the average reader can sense, even if they can’t articulate their issues. With Kushner and Greenwell’s books in particular, there was an Emperor’s New Clothes scenario where the books were just immediately quite dull and difficult and never really paid off on the effort required to read them.

However, I haven’t written one of these pieces in a while. And that’s because I gradually persuaded myself that this whole system had become irrelevant. Yes, publishers would keep putting out literary novels, and they’d keep getting great press. But that extra step, where the book catches fire with the public—that extra step would no longer happen with any particular frequency.

Maybe that’s because the population of serious readers has dwindled. I think that’s probably true, in part. But mostly it’s because the trust is gone. Trust in all institutions is down, and mainstream review pages are an institution like any other. Yes, reviewers might still deliver fawning coverage on demand, but people have increasingly stopped paying attention. As a result, it no longer seemed worthwhile, to me, to critique an institution that had become culturally irrelevant.

I would say my anger is mostly gone. To the extent that any mainstream literary novel is good, I really want it to succeed. I am saddened by the fact that, because coverage of these books is often overly-positive, it’s very hard for the ones that’re actually good to break through the noise and the distrust. But I follow a few Substacks that review mainstream literary fiction—the best is Abra’s

The Booktender

—and if any of these books are good, I’m sure I’ll hear about it through them.

Thinking back on this time of my life, when I felt so passionate about this issue, it honestly feels like a bit of a fever dream. I’m not saying the fever won’t come back, but right now those dark, negative, aggrieved feelings seem quite distant.

Moreover, Donald Trump’s election has really colored how I feel about these pieces. It seems clear that he intends to exert some influence over the cultural sphere, and that many of the institutions I critiqued are going to be profoundly affected by his regime in ways that I think will further reduce their ability to recognize literary quality.

Which leads me to wonder: do I wish that I hadn't written these pieces?

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I think the answer is a cautious “No.”

That’s because, in some difficult-to-define way, those pieces are inextricably intertwined with the fact that in the summer of 2024, I started posting short stories on my Substack.

Many of these stories are amongst the highest-performing on my blog. My top ten most-shared pieces include my male novelists story; the literature is a false god story; the literary criticism is sophistry story, and my novella. Over time, the stories have actually gotten more successful: I’ve learned how to frame them well and pitch them to my audience.

I didn’t tell anyone I was going to start publishing these stories. I just did it. At the time, I had about 600 subscribers, and I sent out one story as a trial balloon. It got shared on Reddit or something and brought in a lot of new subscribers, so I was like…okay, this can work.

Sometimes people ask me, “Why don’t you send these stories to journals?”. But…I do submit to journals. I have published over sixty stories in various journals. I’ve been in every major science-fiction journal, often multiple times (I’ve had three in Asimov’s, three in Clarkesworld, two in F&SF, six in Lightspeed, six in Nature, etc). And I’ve also published in some great middle-tier literary journals, American Short Fiction, Gulf Coast, and West Branch. I’ve been in several best-of anthologies, including the 2022 and 2023 volumes of Best Small Fictions.

However around this time last year, I started writing stories in a distinctly different format—one that was heavily influenced by The Decameron and the Icelandic sagas. The stories in this new format are written in a stripped-back style that is light on visual detail and heavy on events—a style that hearkens to the earliest and most natural forms of prose story-telling: the chronicle, the biography, the pseudo-epistle, the fable, and the fairy tale.

And I knew that journal editors were not going to be excited about these stories! I knew they’d look at them and instantly think, “This doesn’t look how a story is supposed to look”. And they’d pass. And nobody would ever read these stories that I considered so new and exciting.

So I thought…let’s post them online.

This is why it mattered, to me, to insist on the myopia of the publishing industry. When you lose the belief that anyone in the industry is capable of appreciating something new, then that’s a bad thing. That stymies progress, it stymies creativity. My stories, on Substack, resonate more with people than the stories in The Paris Review, and my stories succeed because they are different. Because they’re not tied to all these literary conventions that’ve become ossified and dull.

If I had somewhere else to publish these stories, I would. To some extent, I can get them into sci-fi journals: I have two tale-type stories coming out in Lightspeed sometime this year. But with literary journals, there hasn’t been a lot of interest. And even if there was, who would read them? When you publish a short story in a literary journal, absolutely nothing happens. You get no response whatsoever. There’s no evidence that anyone, other than the editor, actually enjoyed reading this story.

The hope, with these journals, is that you’ll accumulate enough credits that you can convince a publisher to put out a story collection. And then maybe somebody will read that collection. But people spend ten or fifteen years of their life working to convince someone to publish their collection. And then what happens? Most of these collections get maybe a thousand readers. Very occasionally one will get twenty or thirty thousand readers, and when that happens, as it did with Deesha Philyaw’s Secret Lives of Church Ladies, it becomes such a stratospheric event that it often launches the author into a seven-figure deal for their next book.¹ Every year there’s maybe one or two breakout collections like that.

For me, sitting with these brand-new stories in the summer of 2024, it just didn’t make sense to hope for that kind of success. I’d been writing and submitting stories to journals for a long time, and I’d never really provoked any kind of excitement amongst editors, agents, or critics.

So instead I took a risk, and I started posting them online, and over nine months I built a readership that at this point far exceeds the readership of The Kenyon Review or Missouri Review or any of those journals I’d once have aspired to appear within.

Now, my results with this are unusual. Most people who publish stories online haven’t managed to grow their readership like I have.

But maybe that is, in part, because I have pushed myself to find common ground with my readers. Initially, my stories were distinctly less popular than my critical pieces, but over time that’s really changed. The experience of posting these stories week after week has taught me what works and what doesn't. Now, in terms of open rate, likes, shares, and view-count, the two categories are about equal.²

There’s so much talk about how short fiction can’t succeed on Substack, but it doesn’t really succeed anywhere else either! The more fiction a journal publishes, the fewer readers it has. The most successful fiction-only journal is One Story, which only publishes one story a month, because that’s all people want to read. Most contemporary readers have an instinctive aversion to anything that even superficially resembles a literary short story.

Substack doesn’t create that problem; it merely makes the problem unignorable.³ And the solution is to start dropping the traditional literary story's insistence on close point of view, heaps of visual detail, and quiet, allusive plots.

I’ve tried, over the past nine months, to let the stories speak for themselves. And I think that was good. I’ve refined the format a lot over time. Sharing your work online is an immense spur to further improvement. It’s hard to fool yourself that something is working when you can look at the numbers and see it’s not. But I can see now that many of these stories are indeed working.

In the last nine months, I've unlearned twenty years of bad habits. Now that I am self-publishing, I don't need to create the kind of dense, overwhelming prose surface that editors expect. Instead I can deploy images and sense details sparingly, using them for maximum effect. I also control the presentation of the story, so I can decide how authentic I want it to be, how much of a sense of verisimilitude to create around the events—many of my most successful stories are essentially auto-fiction. I can also utilize an unusually flexible point of view that allows my narrator to comment on the action when they want to, and to jump forward or backward in time, or even to carry the narration forward past death. And I have the freedom to write about sex, gender, and God in ways that most literary journals wouldn't allow.

Not every story succeeds. But when they do, they're often shared widely and serve to build my readership, creating a larger constituency for my next story. And when stories don't work, I can't hide from the failure. If an editor rejects a story, I can always tell myself they had terrible taste. But when my own readership isn't into it, then I've nobody to blame but myself. I either need to find different readers or write a different story.

For the first six months of this fiction-writing experiment I published a story a week, but in the past few months I've allowed myself to relax and publish fewer stories (mostly to avoid burnout on my part). However, I continue to be extremely happy with this experiment. I don't know what the future holds for these stories. My ideal is to publish a collection someday, but who knows if that will ever happen. In the meantime it's a pleasure to have something most story-writers never get to experience: a readership.

Elsewhere on the Internet

• Isaac Kolding
  wrote a response to my post on Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Isaac is a PhD student in English and he gives some valuable context on how the novel has fared critically over the last 170 years. Apparently, after a distinct downtown in the early 20th century, its fortunes rose in the 70s and 80s.

  The novel is, by now, canonical—it’s widely assigned, and anybody who seriously studies nineteenth-century American literature must have read the book. But the fact that it is widely studied does not necessarily mean that it is widely respected. I would characterize the current academic reputation of the book as divided: some see it as a masterpiece of great moral power, and some see Stowe as, in essence, a well-intentioned middle-class do-gooder who was morally insightful but also fundamentally blinkered by some of her views on topics like race and gender, and by the sentimental conventions that she uses to such extraordinary effect in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

  Kolding also had a great piece recently on “Bartleby the Scrivener”. If there's one thing I've realized about Substack it's that the hop from commenter to peer is quite a short one, and I think Kolding has more than made that jump. He is one to watch!

• Absolutely wild story in The Yale Review about working at Vanity Fair during the Graydon Carter days. The story contains this mind-boggling admission:

  I’m probably breaking some unwritten law of publishing, but here it is: For twenty-five years, I was contracted to produce three articles a year, long ones, typically ten thousand words. For this, my peak salary was $498,141. That’s not a misprint—$498,141, or more than $166,000 per story. Then, as now, $166,000 was a good advance for an entire book. Yes, I realized it was obscene. I took it with a grin.

• Henry Oliver
  has a great article in Liberties about Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. I am a big Waugh fan, and I’ve always been fascinated by how Brideshead seems so much more baroque and less-humorous than the novels that initially made his reputation. It’s still a great novel, but it’s great in a distinctly different way from Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, or Scoop.

  When Waugh was young, he had written viciously funny books: they loved him for his dark and wicked satire. Now, he seemed to have gone gooey. Like Virginia Woolf spitting rage at T.S. Eliot’s conversion a generation before, the writers felt betrayed. Waugh had gone from wicked social satirist to earnest conservative proselytizer. And worse! He was Catholic. For the literati, this was a double betrayal. An unashamedly aristocratic Catholicism in 1945 was worse than arcane. It was snobbish.

1. Philyaw’s book is a true Black Swan event, because it came out from a university press—WVU Press—and yet it outsold the vast majority of major-label collections that came out in 2020.

2. Sometimes a helpful reader emails me to say they don’t care for my stories, they only care for my critical writing. That’s fine, nothing is for everyone. But my stories do have their fans.

3. I wrote in a previous paid post about how there are too many university-supported literary journals, and how it’s created a glut of writing that nobody wants: