"Excerpt-size" for Better Fitness (or the Veroc Saga Project Journal Entry #4)

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Looking at the copyright page of J.D. Salinger’s infamous novel, The Catcher in the Rye, you might notice something: two incidents in the book appeared in Collier’s and The New Yorker five years before Catcher’s release. Ok, so what? Orson Scott Card’ Ender’s Game, the Hugo and Nebula Award winning novel, was preceded by a short story of the same name in Analog in 1977. Well, that’s the point. Salinger and Card, along with many other authors, use the short stories they write as the basis for a novel or take excerpts from novels they have been working on and release them as short stories. The end all reason of publishing these short stories is to expand the author’s audience.
Having an audience increases an author’s appeal to literary agents, publishers, and readers alike. Is this author’s work marketable? Yes, he has an audience. Should we publish this author’s work? Yes, he has an audience who will buy it. Will someone read this author’s work? People are reading this author’s work and the more people that like the author’s work, the more that will come to like the author’s work.
However, it is not easy to get into literary journals, but in light of the digital era, it goes without saying that the environment is changing. Today, an author can publish anything in minutes over the internet. This is most readily seen in the massive trend of blogging. Today, anyone can blog on anything, so why not authors “blog” their short stories to build an interest in their writing. Some authors don’t even limit themselves to publishing short stories over blogs and put up entire novels in serialized form, not unlike Charles Dickens in magazines all the way back in the nineteenth century. There are pros and cons of doing this, but blogging your creative writing can be a great way to build up your reputation and fan base.  
Thus, I am going to practice what I preach and announce a new, regular feature for this blog: short stories. Each month, starting now, I will publish a short story to this site. The first, “Ceremony,” actually occurs within the Veroc Saga Project. The Project is still ongoing, but I have decided not to serialize it on the restricted sister site or this one and am replacing it with this new feature. I will still post journal entries on the project occasionally.