I don't think I've seen authors brag about huge numbers of short stories available without mentioning that they are short stories. But a person who grabs info from a website might see "oh look, Author X has 27 books at Amazon, while Author Y only has five." Amazon, of course, doesn't bother to list anything like book size in the short-blurb listings.
Smashwords lets you group by length for searches (sort of); Amazon doesn't. The Agency publishers list page counts, but not word counts; until recently, that's not been considered relevant data for customers.
Right now, short stories as separate books is a New Shiny Thing, so it gets noticed. In another 3-5 years, it won't be, and I'm really curious what impact that's going to have on publishing & reporting-of-books. Will the NYT Bestseller Ebook list deal with short stories that outsell novels? Will they invent arbitrary length requirements? (Right now, they don't take self-pubbed ebooks at all; I suspect that's not going to last.)
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Smashwords lets you group by length for searches (sort of); Amazon doesn't. The Agency publishers list page counts, but not word counts; until recently, that's not been considered relevant data for customers.
Right now, short stories as separate books is a New Shiny Thing, so it gets noticed. In another 3-5 years, it won't be, and I'm really curious what impact that's going to have on publishing & reporting-of-books. Will the NYT Bestseller Ebook list deal with short stories that outsell novels? Will they invent arbitrary length requirements? (Right now, they don't take self-pubbed ebooks at all; I suspect that's not going to last.)