Is selling flash fiction easier than selling full-length short stories? And by selling I mean getting paid not just publication.
Is selling flash fiction easier than selling full-length short stories? And by selling I mean getting paid not just publication.
Um, it's easier if you're better at writing flash than regular shorts. If not, then no.
True. I worded it badly. It's harder for the average writer to write flash. Or, to put it another way, I think (but have no data to cite) that there are more good standard-short-story writers than there are good flash-fiction writers. But as has also been noted, there aren't shedloads of good markets for flash.
Writing flash is a great way to teach yourself to write tightly, though!
Is selling flash fiction easier than selling full-length short stories? And by selling I mean getting paid not just publication.
I wrote a flash story in under an hour and sent it off to a pro-paying flash market to see for myself if it is any easier to sell.
ajoker- You can have a lot more than 12 full-length short stories in a year. I write one a week so that means I will have 52 in a year, maybe more.
You can, presumably, write more flash fiction stories and subsequently have more out on submission. Writing for a year, say, you could have one novel, or 12 short stories, or 50 flash fiction stories.
In that respect, it would seem easier from a selling point of view (but as far as I know there aren't close to 50 places that are buying flash fiction).
Is selling flash fiction easier than selling full-length short stories? And by selling I mean getting paid not just publication.
Or twelve novels, or a hundred short stories, or three flash fiction pieces.
Shorter does not always mean faster, and certainly doesn't mean better. I know writers who can write a good novel faster than they can write a good short story.
Now, I've sold quite a few short stories that I wrote in five hours or less, and novels that took less than a month to write, but I've also worked my rear end off, and spent ten days, trying to make something very short good enough to sell.
I wasn't saying it was better. I was saying it was faster, and I think in general it is. For most people, writing a short story will take less time than writing a novel. There will be exceptions, but 8000-20,000 words in general should take less time to write than 80,000-100,000.