Marketing a long short story?

How about pruning? You could tighten those puppies until they bark with clarity, maybe eliminating a subplot.

Or take a good look at why you wrote in that particular length - is it a novel trying to get out?

Or keep looking for markets. Perhaps a serialization?

Best of luck!

So, have you already tried to sell your novellas/novelets to all possible markets? Most magazines set their limits lower, but there are several exceptions.

About your option of taking two partly-common stories and "yoking them together too violently": In full length novels it's common to bounce back and forth between separate subplots chapter by chapter as if they were mostly written apart from each other. If they're "yoked" together oddly, sometimes that's a strength. Besides giving the reader some variety and heightening suspense between the separated chapters, the different worlds within the book running parallel can be a point of interest in itself, as in "I wonder how these come together in the end?"

Some books play with this "weave" of separate worlds without tying them together very intricately at all. Not a plus for adventure/thriller material I admit, where everything better come together tightly in the end. But other kinds of books can instead make some other artsy point through the subplots' juxtaposition.

I'm having trouble thinking of a better example than one from cinema -- Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors. This one consisted of two stories, told in alternating scenes, that don't cross each other at all except for characters who are related and/or know a few of the same people. The separate stories converge only in a conversation at the end by two of the main characters who otherwise hardly know each other, who sort of compare notes about their experiences over drinks. The two stories weaving through C&M hardly match in style and content (one is a tense murder story, the other is romantic comedy), as if they were written as two films that didn't flesh out enough in their original form. Yet those two characters at the end are able to contrast their diametrically opposed world views in light of those stories. So in this case (no idea if it was originally planned that way) the "violent yoking" provided the completed film with a point to ponder at the end.

In short, maybe you should try that yoking and explore the common threads or interesting contrasts that might be hidden so far, even if only to slice the stories up and join them into one as alternating chapters? I only suggest this since you mentioned there are common characters involved anyway -- at some level they're already stories from the same book. Now that your stories and characters are developed it doesn't sound like it would waste much of your time to try it.

Have you tried searching through duotrope.com for that length?

A search for 20,000 words limited to pay rates of semi-pro and better at duotrope.com produces a list of a dozen or so markets, if you subtract the ones marked "closed" for now. But that's an all-genre search. There are only a few choices of spec fic, a few choices of mainstream, and so on, making the list of options per writer pretty short. Better than nonexistent though. And there must be some choices not listed on duotrope.com.

Just double-checked with the word limit cranked down to 15,000 and got dozens of more choices (list of 72 to divide by closed markets, genres, etc.).

I'm told new writers must cram their novelets through the eye of the needle to get them published even in the few markets open to them, but evidently it's not impossible.

Stories

There are generally five options for novelettes/novellas which is what these are.

1. Find one of the rare magazine markets that may take such a story from a new writer.

2. Rewrite them to short story length, which can be done with a complete rewrite. You can't really cut a 20K story down to 5K, but you can write a new 5K story using the same plot and characters.

3. Expand them to novel length.

4. Save them for a time when you do have enough published short stories to sell a collection. A bonus, never before published novelette included in a collection of previously published stories can be a selling point with the reading public.

5. Try to find a small, independent publisher that releases short stories and novelettes in chapbook form.

I don't think...

you posted what kind of story you write, but in the Sticky for markets at the top of this thread you will find several markets' lists, and they all have markets for novellas in them.