One nice feature found in online bookstores is information about the length of the story. It is such a shame more people don't use it! I fell victim to my own laziness once and bought a book that was actually a short story. But I never blamed the author for it. Lately I have seen numerous reviews complaining that the 'book' they bought on Amazon was not a full book. If the book is advertised as a novel, one has a reason to complain, but all of these were on books clearly marked as a short story.
Good short stories take a lot of effort. One has to tell a complete story in very few words, so even more than a novel, each word has to count and many words have to do double or triple duty. The cost of most short stories range from free to about $2. Considering I buy a certain woman's magazine for the two short short-stories and a handful of puzzles and jokes, $1.99 doesn't seem too much to pay for a 10 to 90 page short story. In the magazine, these short stories are one pagers, similar to The Perfect Man, which I wrote last fall for our Halloween hop. Most of the stand alone short stories available on Amazon and Smashwords are much longer and quite good. The two from Karen Chance, The Gauntlet and The Queen's Witch, that I'm introducing today are fine examples.
