Short Fiction in New Digital Formats
Don’t let the name fool you: Little Fiction is a digital publishing project with big potential, tapping into the exploding growth of social media and mobile consumption. As smartphones, e-readers, and digital tablets continue to saturate the North American marketplaces, entertainment – music, video, and literature – are all more readily accessible with the click of a button, the swipe of a finger. We can take it with us. That’s the idea behind Troy Palmer’s Little Fiction: well-crafted short stories we can download and read anywhere, anytime – for free.
Troy Palmer is the Creative Director and Managing Editor of Little Fiction. When he’s not designing covers or putting together stories, he can be found writing, walking too fast or thinking there’s more he needs to be doing. And sometimes all three at once. While also listening to music. He currently lives and rarely sleeps in Toronto.
Interview by Jacqui Barrineau
Since launching Little Fiction in October 2011, you’ve published 22 short stories and one compilation of 16 stories in list form. You have a volume of flash fiction due out Sept. 5 – 14 pieces selected from nearly 200 submissions. That’s a lot reading, editing, formatting, publishing, and promoting – a true “labour of love.” Who makes up the Little Fiction team?
It’s pretty much me. Though I recently enlisted Andrew F. Sullivan and Will Johnson to help with the editing of the upcoming Little (flash) Fiction compilation. I really enjoyed the process of working with those guys, and it’s something I see myself doing more of — there have been a couple of other writers who have volunteered to get involved, and I think I’d be a fool to not take advantage of their offers. Aside from that, I’ve met with a couple of designers, but I’m still a little precious about the look and feel of the site and the covers.
When did the idea of Little Fiction take root and how much time passed before you launched the site?
It took a little over a year to bring it from idea to launch.
Little Fiction seems to have a rolling reading period, which means submissions are read throughout the year. How many submissions do you receive in a month?
It varies. I went through a crazy period where I was getting upwards of ten submissions a week. It’s since slowed down and become a little more manageable (though I’m still running behind with submissions). The rough math says we average over twenty submissions a month (excluding the flash submissions), but that’s probably a bit inflated by a couple of busier periods.
In the run-up to the Little Fiction’s launch, how did you call for submissions? Did you approach writers you already knew?
It was just a completely wide-open call. I launched with a story of mine, and one from another writer that I knew (Little Robin Deadbreast by Kimberley Gillis) but that was it. Things didn’t really getting rolling until I got a story from Shawn Syms (The Exchange) a few weeks after launching. And that was followed pretty closely by Andrew Sullivan’s story (Bright Outside). I think they recognized that Little Fiction was offering something a bit different in the short story world, and they took an early chance on us. I was very fortunate to be able to publish those writers so early on. I think it truly helped establish Little Fiction and set the tone going forward.
You have a background in advertising and marketing, so you certainly understand the “power of free.” You also grasp the impact of social media – and the changing landscape of publishing that requires a considerable digital footprint, with profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest. Are a lot of writers and readers connecting with Little Fiction through social media?
Little Fiction has been built almost entirely through social media, with at least 80% of our audience through Twitter alone. If you’re a writer and you’re not on Twitter, I highly recommend it. The rest of our audience has come through Facebook, Tumblr, and good old-fashioned word-of-mouth. Pinterest, we’re just kind of starting with.
What have the past 11 months taught you about digital publishing? About readers?
The digitization of publishing is sadly and surprisingly still in its infancy. Right now there are too many proprietary formats and not enough standardization. I think that’s important. If you draw comparisons to the music world, there’s really one format (at least that’s how it started), and it wasn’t until the iTunes store launched in 2003 that the business side of it somewhat solidified. In publishing, we have Amazon Kindle, iBooks, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and more — they’re all just fighting for market share, rather than trying to add true value for consumers.
For publishers, there are problems with pricing, distribution agreements and business models. And now with so much more of our lives moving to cloud storage, it’s going to create new demands and new problems for them. The only progress there is that big publishers have recognized digital publishing as a viable revenue stream. But all they’re doing is attempting to milk it for as much as they can. They don’t consider the end user — what they want, what will make the best experience for them. And that more than anything is going to be the death of them. I’m not going to pretend to have the answers, but there are a number of indie publishers who seem to handling the digital aspect right, hopefully we can we be one of them.
As for readers, I learned pretty quickly that most of Little Fiction’s readers are also writers. Which is awesome. Again to draw a music comparison, a good majority of indie music fans are also musicians themselves. It’s how communities are built.
Your pieces Claire and A Catalogue of Future Wars are on the site, and you told the folks at Mosaic that you had been writing for a long time and had prior experience with self-publishing. With all the time it takes to be a creative director/managing editor, are you writing much at all now?
Less so, for sure. But I have a few short pieces that I’ve either submitted elsewhere or am close to submitting. And I’ve been hacking away at novel for the last couple of years. It’s getting close to a first draft, but finding the time to commit to it has definitely been getting more difficult.
What have the past 11 months taught you about writing? About writers?
There are a lot of great writers out there who are working hard, and they still recognize the value in “gatekeepers” and editors. They haven’t bought into the idea of self-publishing being the next great thing. And I think that’s important. I can see the temptation in self-publishing, especially when you hear about the one or two who have struck it rich, but it’s not a route I typically support — there are too many parties willing to take your money and they don’t do a thing to promote your work. Even when I dabbled in self-publishing long ago, it was more about trying to start a small press.
The site says you offer editing advice. How much are you willing to work with the newer writers to polish a piece? What if you thought a story had potential – but the mechanics weren’t there. Would Little Fiction reject the piece, urging the writer to polish it and try again? Or would you work with the writer to overhaul the piece, making it ready for publication?
I offer editing comments on the stories that Little Fiction publishes, more as just a second set of eyes. Typically the stories that end up getting selected come to us in a pretty good shape — you can tell the writers have put in the time to craft them and write and re-write them. As for the stories that don’t make it, I usually do my best to offer some feedback — reasons why the story was rejected and some thoughts on what could help it. I do my best to handle rejections the way that I would want to be treated as writer. It’s pretty rare that I just respond by saying “your story wasn’t right for us.” Though sometimes that is simply the case.
Listerature, Vol. I, is a fascinating compilation of short stories in list form. Although each story is in list form, they’re all very different, representing a variety of voices and subjects. Tell us about the format. What drew you to it? What were the submission guidelines for the writers?
Thanks. The idea came from a piece that Jennifer Egan wrote for the Guardian around the time that Little Fiction was being mapped out. I thought it was an intriguing thing to offer when we launched. The guidelines were just that the stories had to be in a list form. But they had to be stories, with beginnings and endings and strong conflicts in the narrative. I didn’t want lists in the McSweeney’s sense. They already crush that whole thing.
According to the Little Fiction Tumblr, you’ll celebrate Little Fiction’s first year in October with stories from stories from Jessica Kluthe and Erin Lebacqz, and maybe some cupcakes. Anything else? Twelve months of running your own digital publishing operation is cause for more commemoration than just a cupcake.
Yeah, a year… I’m amazed that not only has it been a year already, but also with how successful a year it’s been. And not just in terms of followers and site traffic and downloads, but more in the quality of stories and writers we’ve been able to publish. It blows me away every time I think about it. As for how we’re going to celebrate, there are a couple of things we’re working on, but we’re not going to say just yet.
Jacqui Barrineau is an editor and writer living in Northern Virginia. In a younger life, she was the assistant editor of Cold Mountain Review.
