One of the features of modern fruit trees is that they’re being adapted to modern urbanized living. People just don’t have the space for an orchard, or even a full-sized tree. So, horticulture has fitted itself around providing just exactly what they can have. The still WANT their own fruit, but there is no way they can have an orchard in the tiny yard. The plant nursery owner wants to sell fruit trees. He could of course refuse to produce any trees that did not fulfil his ideals of a noble fruit-tree – twenty five feet high by twenty-five wide, producing bountifully, several hundredweight of apples… Only when the customer only has 15′ by 20′ and has no way of using hundreds of pounds of one variety of apple… well, he isn’t a customer.

So: the horticulturalist has root-stocks which produce trees that are not so big. And then they graft the tree variety that the customer wants onto it. If it is a dwarfing or step-over or semi-dwarfing root-stock, you end up with trees that will produce some fruit, even in a tiny space. Even a container. It’s not very much fruit compared to the full-size tree. But it is some fresh fruit, and honestly, can be a better bargain than a truck load of the same variety — when you can’t sell it and don’t have storage space or the time to preserve.

Of course: there’s one better – the fruit-salad tree — where two or more different fruits or varieties get grafted onto one tree. Possibly even a dwarfing root-stock… And you have a tiny tree that produces a taster at least of several varieties.

And they sell a LOT of trees to customers who just love this product, and show it off to their friends (who may then become customers).

This has a lot of parallels in the writing world. There are a lot of customers out there whose lives dictate them wanting a certain product. Don’t assume they’ll buy your product because it suits you to produce just that. And yes, some of that demand is for a great big fat goat-gagger of a book. And some of it is for audio. And some is for shorter books and different types (or varieties) of books. There is a market for all sorts – it’s just not an equally big market, and frankly, for some things like poetry or literary fiction, that can be very small and hard to live on unless you are the chosen variety. And of course, the readers of different genres have different length expectations. If you’re enormously popular you can ignore these – but for the rest of us — especially if you’re writing for an anthology where you’ve got a fairly precise word-count (say 5000, or 10 000 – or precisely 50) it becomes very important to graft your story to the right stock.

I can only tell you what works for me, but each point of view adds about 50% length – so if it is really needing to be short I stick with one POV. Each character (non-POV) adds 5%(minor)-20% (important) to a story. Each plot thread, likewise. If you’re going to write a lot of anthology fiction, you can save yourself a lot of heartache (cutting or adding to get to wordcount) by knowing just effect these things have on your length.

Or you can write whatever you can or want and look for a market to fit it. That works too. And nothing is quite off-limits – even fruit salad stories which are many genres — these are tricky because you are trying to please many masters at once. As I can attest this does not always work – it can be a tricky balance to achieve. But… sometimes it works well. Maybe you are that one that balances them well!