364,000,000 reasons to celebrate the short story
I went onto the Internet this morning, keyed in the words ‘short stories’ and received the news that there were 364,000,000 pages to go at.
That is an astonishing figure and does underline the way that the Internet has helped revive what was an endangered art form.
There was a time in that shadowy pre-history age before the Internet when short stories were all the rage but, as they became less popular with readers, more and more publishers turned to other genres.
Recent years, however, have seen a revival in the short story’s popularity, as mentioned in previous blogs here, and I really do believe that the web can take a lot of credit for that.
We hope that we are playing our own small part in that revival and that the more competitions we stage, the more entries we receive and the more writers who secure prizes, will only add to that success.
And maybe writers’ success in competitions like ours can provide that vital bit of extra confidence that writers need. I heard the other day that a writer who won a previous competition that we ran two years ago has just secured a major book deal, and is now being tipped for a glittering career. It can happen.