Writing for Publication: Online Litmags and Short Form Fiction

The world has changed. No matter where on its timeline you first landed, if you’re old enough to read this, you’re old enough to know things are different now from how they were at the moment of your first viable memory. Each generation brings innovation and evolution of the species, sometimes slow but always inexorable.

The sphere of literature is no different. The time of the classics has passed, and while we read them to know where we came from as a literate culture, they are no longer commercial or marketable to the mainstream. Yesterday’s 200,000-word tomes have given way to 90,000-word trade paperbacks, and 10,000-word short stories are seldom as widely read as 500-word flash fiction. Word economy is the new religion. “Trim the fat” is a mantra we’ve all heard. We have to hook the reader in the first five lines or we lose them altogether. We compete for their attention against cell phones, gaming apps, flashing ads in the sidebars, and brain fog from sensory overload. Like it or not, if today’s writers want to capture today’s readers, we have to consider that we’re going after an entirely new market.

Steemhouse Literary Journal is preparing for the launch of its first issue. One of the problems our developers had to solve was how to effectively display a preview that would entice readers to consume at least the first few words of a story, then find a way to expand the story seamlessly on the screen without causing a distraction or taking the reader off the landing page. We realized over the course of the past year that the trendy grid formats of most Steem front ends simply would not work for us. In addition, twenty-five words of an excerpt are not enough to motivate a distracted reader to invest in the story. We also had to chose a screen-friendly font at a comfortable opacity and size as well as find a background color neutral enough to emulate the experience of reading a printed page.

Another thing we learned in the course of our research is that regardless of how well we present material for readers to consume, the content itself will factor in their reading choices. This is a separate matter from core quality or editing. This is about overall construction of the story, where the hook falls, and how the narrative thru-line flows from one paragraph to the next.

The First Fifty

In the more expanded landscape of novel-length fiction, it’s generally accepted that the first few lines of the first chapter are the most critical real estate of the entire 100,000 words, and that the inciting incident must occur at some point before chapter two. With short form fiction that is published online, we don’t get that luxury. Authors have to be mindful from the outset that their stories will be competing with other stories on the page as well as all the aforementioned distractions, and that they have approximately fifty words to convince a reader to click the “read more” button. The way our litmag is set up, we’ll afford slightly more than fifty words if we must. But more than that and the preview excerpt will not serve its purpose, and stories may go unread.

In the early days of manual typesetting and print, one practice authors were told to avoid was beginning a chapter with dialogue. This “rule” got passed down from one generation of writers to another, so that by the early 2000s, critique groups around the world were routinely red-lining any manuscript with chapters that opened with something other than narrative. Eventually a younger generation of writers began to question this “rule,” and after a brief flurry of explanations that made no sense, some grizzled old publisher from some ink-stained back alley print shop spoke up and said, “It ain’t got nothin’ to do with what yer reader likes. It’s how hard it is for us to typeset a dropcap with a damn quotation mark.”

And so the riddle was solved. Dropcaps have fallen out of favor now and the old “no opening with dialogue” has gone the way of the dinosaur. But there’s a lesson here about formatting and the mediums we use to publish. Online litmags serve a niche audience and market competition is fierce. Any writer who seriously wants to capture their share of that market is going to consider the physical and mechanical ways their text will appear on the page. If you have only fifty words to hook a reader, then bring your A-game to those fifty words. Make it impossible for all but the most emotionally-crippled dullard to forego clicking “read more.” This strategy is not easy, but it’s worth the effort.

White Space Is Your Friend

If your short fiction contains paragraphs that take up the entire screen, you have instantly alienated a large portion of readers who find wall-to-wall text to be a source of eye strain. Split those paragraphs in half, then split the halves in half again. Break things up. Give your reader visual waypoints and they will stay with your story a lot longer, possibly even to the end. In the “good old days” of print publication, white space was costly because it required the use of more paper. In this electronic world, white space costs nothing and the lack of it can cost you an audience.

Serial Fiction

One thing Steemhouse Literary Journal intends to publish a lot of is serial fiction. This would come in the form of novelettes, short stories between 10,000 and 30,000 words. These will be published chapter by chapter, one installment per day, until the series is complete. Serial fiction is not a new concept. Even online serial fiction has been around for a while. But we intend to define it. Watch for future posts about writing hooks and EOCs, and how to create mini-arcs within each chapter to keep readers coming back for more.

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