I wasn't aware that I was denying these books a place on GR.

What's significant is that if a book is self-published, the first rights can still be licensed (sold) to a commercial publisher, precisely because the book has not been published by their definition.

Sqrl - I just quoted those few authors. I don't see why you say that 'Mark Twain was so long ago that it really doesn't count-that's how things were done then.' That's simply not true! Most people then as now got publishing contracts. I am not sure about Grisham. I had read that A Time To Kill was self-published but I can't find the source of that so you may very well be right. However, there are many ultra-famous authors whose first book being self-published cannot be questioned and who no-one would deny has a right to have their book on Goodreads - Ken Blanchard's brilliant, One Minute Manager for one example, L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics for another. These books sold millions, but their initial edition was self-published.

Needless to say the word publish means to print and distribute to the public. That definition doesn't touch on who published it or who paid for it to be published. If the book is out there to be purchased and someone has a copy (no matter how acquired - gift, library, purchase) and reviews it and another person could on reading that review purchase a copy then it perfectly qualifies for an entry in Goodreads.

Your point of some authors set up their own small press. True. Julie Aigner-Clark set up the Baby Einstein company to publishe her own books. The company was eventually sold for $25m to Disney. Who could know she would do so well? So how can you deny recognition and the consequent necessary publicity to authors who failing to win a publishing contract put their own money behind their book?

Quite often self-published authors set up a small press that only publishes them (or them and their friends) which can also complicate matters.

And actually, Amazon and B&N frequently list the self-published books. Even the ones that are strictly Publish-on-Demand (each one is printed as an order comes in) like Lulu. It makes it a little more complicated when buying books for our library, because we do exclude all vanity press from our collection and sometimes patrons assume it's not self-published because it's on Amazon. So you have to Google each publisher before placing an order.

John Grisham was not self-published when he started out.

Mark Twain was so long ago that it really doesn't count--that's how things were done then. It's not how they're done now.

The dictionary and the self-publisher and whoever they've paid their money to are welcome to consider those books "published"; in the world of commercial publishing, however, they are not.

Petra and All, Here is the quote from the instructions for the GR authors' program:

The Authors Program is designed for people with published books. It's best if your work is on a bookseller's site like Amazon, but we will accept any author who has published a book. This includes authors from other countries as well as authors who are self-published (such as through Ebooks or services like Lulu).

Petra, Oh I think Goodreads does include self published novels.

In Goodreads instructions to authors it says it's better if a book can be found on Amazon but will work with books self published or otherwise not showing there.

The short story in question was a story someone had posted on their web site, and only there, not seeming to intend it for publication anywhere else.

The dictionary.com definition of published is 'To prepare and issue (printed material) for public distribution or sale.'

Wikipedia defines self-published as, 'Self-publishing is the publishing of books and other media by the authors of those works, rather than by established, third-party publishers.'

So I am at a loss to understand why a novel printed by Authorhouse or iUniverse is not considered published.

Self-publishing is not a new phenomen, its just never been so popular. We all have to start somewhere and the following authors started that way: John Grisham, Mark Twain, Margaret Atwood and Tom Clancy. Can we say that their first novels weren't really published?

I didn't know that about those novels.

I'll be interested to hear the final verdict from Goodreads!

It's more complicated than that. A short story on someone's website isn't 'really' published, but nor is a novel printed through AuthorHouse or iUniverse, and GR lists those.

So is the website-'published' short story in or out?

I think you missed the point, I didn't say ALL short stories are published, I said they are published and this is a clear dividing line. All novels are not published either and we don't leave novels out because of this.

I would definitely add the book; what I'm wavering over is adding individual stories. Maybe if they are in a book, but not otherwise? Meh!

Squirrel, Some of the best short stories I've read over the years have been in magazines. I wouldn't add those to Goodreads. However, a lot of the fine short stories that are originally published in magazines frequently end up as a story in a book of short stories, and the book I would add. Many stories in books were published first in magazines, and that's noted in books' credits.

Often short stories aren't published in collections, or anthologies; they're published in magazines, and webzines, and on coffee cans and so forth. So adding them to GR isn't that straightforward.

Well, apparently there are certain short stories that are not actually published at all, unless you consider appearing on the writer's web page being published.

My thought is that short stories ARE published, they are published in collections. This makes them different from the other examples mentioned and gives a clear dividing line. The problem is they are often published in more than one collection. If all stories only appeared as "chapters" in one collection and no where else then the way GoodReads works now would be fine.

Thanks Abigail. I agree with you. Some of my journals really are "books" in my opinion but I wouldn't add them.

And I had thought Otis/Goodreads had been clear about books only, but maybe not.

Until we get firm guidelines, I'll be very reluctant to take any actions to remove "non-books."

I have little problem with NOT A BOOKs though and there are thousands of these as well; there's a lot to do with just those, and with the combining that's constantly necessary.

I'm confused as well, Lisa. I can understand the rationale for including written works "published" online (ebooks and the like), but a story that's posted on an author's website, as a little extra for fans, struck me as being a perfect illustration of Michael's slippery slope idea...

Why would a short story, never published on its own, be more acceptable than a journal, magazine or comic, that was published seperately? These last three have better claims to being "seperate" works, but they aren't allowed on goodreads... are they?

I remember having a discussion years ago as what qualified as art or not when the local art gallery put up a series of huge plain white canvases with a small dot of colour in one corner or another. I suppose the equivalent on Goodreads could be a single word comment. If a long one counts as an essay, maybe a single word is just a succint way of saying the same thing and therefore equally valid.

Most published books have an isbn and the few that don't are generally self-published from recognised publishers. Short stories not in collections don't have either of those attributes. I can't say anything about audio books or anything on line as I have no experience of either.

Ack! I've deleted very few things. I'm willing to stop deleting them. But this story was just on a person's website. I need better instructions on what to leave. If we leave everything members manually enter, there will be thousands & thousands of "non-books" on the site. Fine with me if it's fine with Goodreads.

I apologize if I incorrectly deleted. I'm usually such a wimp; I've usually allowed others to delete.

I'd appreciate some clear guidelines.

Thaniks!

I am concerned about this thread. We don't support short stories, but if someone has gone to the trouble of manually adding them and rating them, is there harm in leaving them in? You can debate either way, but I think it's cooler to be more flexible.

As for formats, by "book format" I don't mean paper - I mean anything that's got lots of written or spoken words divided into chapters. That means ebooks, audio books, and bound books all are fine to catalog.

but as the policy currently stands, this is an inappropriate entry, no?

Abigail and All,

Yes, and I deleted it. I did message the member who manually added it because I am always reluctant to delete anything on members' shelves. But it was not (at least currently) reading material that belongs in the Goodreads database.

Kelley Armstrong also has many short stories that are published only online, and it's never even occurred to me that those are appropriate to list on here even though I've read them and have gotten in the habit of recording everything I've read. How do you distinguish between those and an eBook an author publishes online but not in paper format?

Michael: I've been following along on this thread, without commenting, but feel I have to "put my oar in" at this point. I don't think you're being cynical at all - just practical. There have to be SOME kind of limits, or goodreads would descend into total chaos.

Everybody has something they feel should be added to the entry standards: short stories listed seperately, audio books listed seperately, individual comic books, magazines, etc. I myself read a lot of academic journals, whose content can be far more substantial than some of the books listed here... But the thing is, goodreads isn't a "reading site," it's a "book site," right? I'm not trying to be provocative, just to point out that goodreads couldn't possibly encompass every form of reading material, and remain a coherent whole.

That doesn't mean that other forms of reading have no value, or are unimportant... On a related note, I've just stumbled across a listing for an online story, "published" only on the author's website. I think it highlights Michael's point about a slippery slope:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38452...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but as the policy currently stands, this is an inappropriate entry, no?

Let me preface this by stating that in principle I support a way of including short stories and such. I am very concerned about the practicality of any implementation though.

The problem is that there is a full continuum of writing without strict boundaries. Functionally, there is absolutely no difference between a short story anthology and a collection of novels in a single omnibus volume. They are both single collections of smaller works. In the case of the novels, we have a way of rating the individual works because they have been published as separate books, but with short stories we currently do not. But what is the real boundary?

Novellas are in between in length and usually not published as individual books, but occasionally they may be...in fact, this seems to be happening more and more often, lately.

An argument has been made in the past for including individual issues of comics (Otis even mentions this as a possibility above); many very good arguments have been made against it. But even individual comics may contain multiple stories, so even if included there would still have be an issue of someone wanting to rate the subpieces.

Short stories are just that...short. On GoodReads, librarians have tried to use publishing format as a way of distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable entries, but electronic publishing completely kills any semblance of logic and consistency. eBooks are great, and when they are just electronic versions of something published on paper, we usually are able to justify them, but there are many "books" (usually self-published) which are now only being created as electronic files. We count these...but where does one draw the line? Short stories, not being bound by paper issues, may all be published as individual files. If we include these, where do we stop? What constitutes electronic publishing?

Tor is currently publishing new science fiction/fantasy short stories on its website...these would seem to be acceptable in any "allow short story" scenario, but what constitutes a legitimate short story and what doesn't? They're just published as webpages, not eBooks, not ISBN's, etc...

This discussion also mostly revolves around fiction, but many people read predominantly nonfiction. What is the nonfiction equivalent of a short story? An essay or article? And when one goes there, everything REALLY falls apart. Now we're potentially looking at magazine or newspaper articles and editorials, or, once we start looking at electronic publication, virtually anything on the web. Without a strict (and most likely arbitrary) definitely, we'll be open to including websites, blogs, or anything else.

As I joked in a previous thread on a similar topic a few months ago, I could argue that each and every post in this thread qualifies as a mini-electronic essay and therefore I am going to add each as a separate "book" to one of my shelves and rate all of them (Otis gets 5*'s on principle [we're GR fanboys, therefore we auto-rate all of his posts as 5*'s:], but I'm only giving my own post 3*'s for being obstructionist... :-)

Obviously, this is the absurdist extreme end, but I don't see a way of preventing it if we wander too far from the book concept. Maybe I'm being overly cynical (who me?)...maybe someone can come up with a solution we just haven't thought of yet...but as much as I'd personally like a way to include short stories, I think it's a very difficult and potentially dangerous (even if somewhat arbitrary) line to cross...

----

And just to look at it from a completely different angle, what about audio books. Currently, audio books are acceptable because they are read versions of published books...but where is that line? If someone publishes a radio or movie script as a book (e.g., The Original Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio show has been published as a book) then shouldn't the radio show count as an "Audio book" version of that book? (Is publication order important? Author's "intent"?) What about an audio version of something which is only published as an ebook? What about when some author decides to release some new story *only* as an Audio Book? (To my knowledge this hasn't happened, but I bet at some point it will). Does that count or not? If it does, then the line between audio books and any other form of audio is blown...e.g., why not include a song which tells a story? You then movie immediately into all songs...and if a photographic "book" without words can count as a book, then why not music without words.... And, by the way, video and movies are also knocking on the door at this point...

I now return you to your regularly scheduled cynicism, already in in progress.

There are some short stories I'd love to shelve individually, but I recognize how this may complicate the system overall.

Maybe reverse the problem. Look at identifying the individual shorts within anthologies. Perhaps you could somehow check off or highlight which shorts you actually read. Then again, don't some of the larger anthologies have 20+ stories each? Maybe not. *g*

Maybe we could enable it on a shelf basis, ie anyone who wants to list short stories separately would be able to have a particular kind of shelf that facilitates it. Just letting short stories loose among the books would be a nightmare!

Not that I'm the person who knows how to code such a thing :).

I'm a fan of the short story and think of it as it's own art form. The collection itself of short stories often doesn't really mean much, there are collections of classic authors at Barnes and Noble that contain several novels each. I would never consider the collections to be works just because they have an ISBN (I'm assuming, maybe not).

It seems to me as long as you kept the titles correct it shouldn't be that hard to include a short story listing, whith a list of where it appeared. I don't have any understanding of what it takes to maintain the databases of this site, although I do appreciate the work.

Here are some listings for a short story called "A Gun is a Nervous Thing" by Charlotte Armstrong (I just picked something at random).
http://www.philsp.com/homeville/ISFAC/s1...
http://authors.wizards.pro/books/titles/...

In the scheme of things I guess it's not all that important, I had just noticed that I often remember individual stories, but not the collections they came from. I've also heard stories read (like on "Selected Shorts") but never read a book they appeared in.

So far we have kept to things published in a book format

I think the question is: what is book format, when speaking of ebooks?

I'm inclined to continue with status quo, unless it will help librarians keep things clean.

Otis, I think the status quo (books only) not only is what I prefer for Goodreads, but also keeps is easier for librarians to keep the database in good shape.

I do sympathize with the short story dilemma, although I do think that most can be found in books; members' reviews could make clear if they read just one short story if that's so, and while I don't believe that's an ideal solution, it's the best one I can think of, at least for now.

I admit it's tempting to categorize short stories separately, but I'd rather keep GR to strictly books or else it gets really muddy, lol.

Interesting. If there are lots of people having the same problem, then perhaps its time to address the issue. So far we have kept to things published in a book format (usually means with an ISBN if its new) for consistency and ease of use.

The parts to whole problem is difficult if parts of one database entry have their own database entries. We don't want every chapter of Harry Potter to have a separate entry, for instance.

We could add a "type" field to a book, which might have values like: book, short story, comic, etc. The implications of this are far-reaching through the site if we followed through, and we don't want to change the conceit of the site to be non-book focused, so we've avoided this so far. But you could argue we could keep it literary and have multiple forms of media.

I'm inclined to continue with status quo, unless it will help librarians keep things clean.

An official Goodreads policy would be helpful. Things are getting muddy here.

I'm not sure if that counts as being published. Maybe we can get an official verdict on this one?

ebook retailers will sell individual short stories (or even give them away)

In a case like this, if something has been published by itself it can be considered a book. If Goodreads hasn't pulled the book listing in, you should feel free to add it yourself. (I say, speaking as a volunteer librarian and not as an official Goodreads voice.)

I've noticed lately, though, that ebook retailers will sell individual short stories (or even give them away), so it's difficult to post a review here of that one individual story. My example, The Winds of Time by James H. Schmitz. I read it on my BlackBerry via MobiPocket and was ready to post a review of it here, but I discovered I would have to find it in an anthology and post a review of that book. So, I scrapped that idea because it would have been dishonest, to me, to post a review of a book I had not read.

Anyway, when I do read anthologies of short stories, I use a spreadsheet to review and rate each individual story and then use the cumulative average rating for the overall rating of the publication.

In the past it has been decided that short stories -- like individual comics -- do not get their own listings. There are so many, and their lack of ISBNs and other publication information makes having them in the database a challenge.

You can always give a specific review on a short story collection, mentioning one or more stories by name. (Which reminds me, I meant to go back and do that with a collection I read recently. Thanks for the reminder!)

I was wondering if short stories shouldn't have an individual listing for the piece? If it's a collection of stories by one author it's usually easy to judge, but many stories appear in several collections and may have been published in magazines, etc.

I was thinking of how I often read a short story I love in a collection I don't. How do you rate the book?

A short could be listed with the note "appears in..."

Sorry if this has already been settled, I couldn't find anything about it.