Guest Blog by Alain Gomez

Alain Gomez lives in San Diego and has been writing since she was sixteen. She works in the field of music but has continued to pursue her passion for writing as an independent author. Though she generally sticks to writing shorter stories, Alain enjoys experimenting with a variety of genres including romance and thrillers. Alain’s blog is at http://bookbrouhaha.blogspot.com/. Her Space Hotel collection is available from Amazon.

Guest Blog by Alain Gomez:

Short Stories Spread Social Disease

Or at least that’s what it feels like sometimes when trying to find someone to review your work.  How does one gain exposure as a new self-published author? It’s simple, they say. Pay for advertising if you’d like, but the best thing to do is send your work to book bloggers and have them review it. This sounds simple enough. So what if they hate it? I can take criticism like the rest of them.

There are thousands of book bloggers out there willing to write reviews. So it’s usually not hard finding several dozen that review your genre. But that’s when the narrowing down process starts.  Not every reviewer accepts self-published works. Of the ones that do, not all of those accept e-books. Out of that considerably smaller pool… you have to find one that actually reads short stories.

Yes, for some reason, reviewers will reject stories that are too short. I completely respect each reviewer’s right to accept whatever story they want. But the sheer number of people who have told me “I don’t review short stories” has led me to suspect that this genre must spread a truly heinous social disease to the reader.

It just does not make sense to me. If I accepted full-length novels on a regular basis for review, I would most likely welcome the occasional short story to mix things up a bit. If nothing else, it wouldn’t take me very long to read and review. Perhaps if the story(ies) are so short they are not worth the time? I have no idea.

The intent of this blog is not to pick on blog reviewers. Those people provide an invaluable service to the author community. It is merely to point out that there is a very real (I’d almost like to say unfounded) stigma toward short stories. The short story is its own literary genre; they are not mini-novels.