Finding the right length for a story is a careful balancing act. Personally, I try not to release anything as a standalone release that’s less than 5,000 words. Any shorter than that and it feels very lightweight. Longer, though, can be a difficult proposition. For now, the short story format seems to fit nicely. I’m not committing to only writing short stories, but it’s something that is working nicely for me at the moment.
Sometimes stories will just evolve while writing to be longer or shorter than I was expecting, and that’s just the way it tends to happen.
Receiving feedback and reviews that stories are too short can be perturbing. I’d love nothing more than to turn some of the short stories into novel length books, or even series, but there are some practical limitations that I come up against rather quickly.
The first is that I have a backlog of other stories I need to clear from my system before I can return to the stories that can or should be made into something longer.
Secondly, there are some stories that I just can’t seem to find the appropriate hook to make into something larger. To me they’ll always be shorts. It’s possible that I’ll come up with something in the future that will allow them to be made into something longer.
Please don’t let that stop you, the reader, from giving me the feedback that you want a story, or collection of stories to be made into something longer. I have a couple of short stories that will be made into something longer when I get the chance, including one that I hadn’t considered a viable candidate. The only reason why I have moved it into that collection is based off reader feedback, and ideas are slowly forming about the path to take to make it something more.
I value all feedback so please send it through. What it’s telling me when readers tell me my book is too short is that I am leaving them hungering for more and am holding their interest quite nicely. I plan on making it my goal to leave you, the reader satiated from my writing.