Collections
Really? That's what the publishers assume, but I actually believe a lot of people who normally wouldn't read, would love to read short stories because they are more bite-size chunks than a full novels. It's the economics that don't work. People are unlikely to buy them because of the prices the publishers put on such books.
It isn't what publishers assume, it's a simple fact based on actual sales. Contrary to what many believe, the short story has never been very popular with most readers, whether in collections, or in magazines.
The price publishers put on books has nothing to do with it. Even back when books and magazines were dirt cheap, very few people wanted short story collections, unless they were by very famous writers.
And books really don't cost very much. When you allow for inflation, and for the rise in wages over the years, books really cost no more now that they ever did.
Another myth is that short stories in magazines used to be wildly popular. They weren't. The reason most magazines have stopped publishing short stories is that a very large majority of readers have always wanted that space to be used for more articles. Magazines used to publish fiction because they thought it was the right thing to do, that it added to culture, and enough people bought magazines for the articles to allow some space to be given over to short stories, even if most readers didn't want them.
Even in the best of times, magazines that were completely fiction had very low circulation numbers, and tended to fold on a regular basis.
There are readers who love short stories, of course, but they're few and far between. Not nearly enough to support an active market for them.
Novels have always paid the bills, and writers who can sell enough short stories to earn a publisher a profit have almost always been those who were widely known for their novels. Stephen King, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, etc. There have been exceptions here and there, but the exceptions are so few that it just doesn't pay to experiment.
Publishers have tried, have always tried, to sell collections of short stories, but whether the book cost three bucks in the forties, or thirty bucks today, readers just do not buy them in any real numbers unless the writer is also a novelist, and the readers love the novels.
