BookFox

The iTunes of Short Stories

One Story's blog, Save the Short Story, alerted me to newest short story podcasting site, Sniplits. The idea behind the name, I believe, is that while listening to audio books in the car doesn't allow you enough continuity to enter the dream-like experience of the novel, a snippet of literature -- such as a short story -- is the perfect length for a trip to Whole Foods or LA Fitness. The site is searchable by genre (Horror, Humor, or Literary/Mainstream -- wait, why are those last two together?) and by time (five to thirty-five minutes).

Unfortunately, at least for downloaders, it is a pay site, but as One Story mentioned, that just makes this the iTunes of short stories. Also, I hope some of the fees, which are 48 cents for stories under five minutes and 88 cents for stories longer than that, make it back to the author. If you're adverse to buying on the first visit, they do offer one free short story a week. Currently, the site only offers about a hundred short stories, but since it's only in beta mode, I'm guessing that number will be increasing exponentially in the near future.

The Podcasts Are Marching On Again, Hurrah; Hurrah

Over at Pinky's Paperhaus there's a post about a new development with the Short Story Review -- they're going to start podcasting short stories in September of 2008, and are already reading submissions. It's a new journal, with only two issues out, but now fifty-two stories a year will be podcasted, selected from the jaws of the slush pile, so go ahead and send in your work. The only downside is that initially, podcasts will only be retained for two months, which I think is a shame in this age of digital, and am positive they could create the space and bandwidth to retain them indefinitely if they just talk to an experienced podcaster.

This is the second literary podcast I'm aware of, other than Boundoff, which is listed in the right sidebar under The Short Story. Both have limits of 3000 and 2500 words, respectively, a word count range that takes ten minutes or more to read, but I could easily see a market emerging for even longer podcasted short stories. After all, books on audio have been doing quite well. I'm guessing we'll be seeing even more literary journals take this podcasting route, as it doesn't have the stigma of publishing fiction online, yet is hip and cool (as the kids are saying these days) and is much cheaper than print.

Bonus Note: I love the common sense but nonetheless necessary disclaimer at the bottom of the Short Story's writers' guidelines: "Short Story does not accept personal essays, poetry or literary criticisms." Just for all the submitters who never happen to read the title of the journal. From all the random submissions we receive at Southern California Review, I wouldn't be surprised to find that number rather high.