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I think writers as a whole are far less inclined to concern themselves with market fit than many developers are.

Short stories haven’t historically been very lucrative relative to longer works. Although there were some genres, eg SF, where they were a natural entry point.

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Maybe they should be? I suggested short stories as a way to practice and test the waters since they would work well with social media and aggregator sites, people are willing to read a short story they find on reddit or hn but much less likely to read a whole book. Keeping your “demos” short also requires less commitment and takes less time so you can do more of them. The idea isn’t to earn money from short stories but to do analytics on them in order to decide which to turn into a novel.

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