In July 2013, I served as the “editor-in-residence” for the Codex Writing Group, which meant basically I was asking a month-long AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) interview. With Codex’s permission, I’m re-posting the Q&As here on my blog. The questions were all provided by members of Codex.

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I’d like to hear your thoughts on word counts. From a writer’s standpoint, they seem fairly arbitrary. One publication will accept x, but prefers y, another will only accept y, and another takes anything at all. Are these purely practical concerns, do you think, or are there aesthetic decisions about “what makes an effective story” as well? If it’s more than just the practical, why do you think your preferences are what they are?

I personally have a strong preference for short stories, as opposed to longer works. Of course, I do like some longer works–not just novels, but novelettes and novellas, etc.–but typically, most often, short stories work best for me. That said, for Lightspeed setting the word count range was also definitely a practical concern; if you open the doors to longer and longer stories, it makes it harder and harder to fit that into a budget. And I don’t want to publish an issue of the magazine that only has two or three stories in it because I devoted all of my word count to two longer stories instead of finding the usual 8. People sometimes say: well, it’s all digital, so word count shouldn’t matter–there’s no limit to “page count”; of course that’s true, but while there’s no page count, there is, as I mentioned, a budget–and the cost of each issue needs to fit within it.

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