"There’s something inherent in the culture of reading and publishing that historically, perceptually, and financially makes it difficult for shorter works to succeed. If it’s true (as I think it is) that reading culture as we know it was born in the mid-Victorian triangulation of affordable mass printing, widespread literacy, and a middle class with a lot of leisure time on its hands, then it’s no surprise that the novel became the most dominant and popular literary form. The novels we read today aren’t the “loose, baggy monsters” that the Victorians read, but we did inherit a few of their prejudices: namely, we tend to associate heft with seriousness, while slighter volumes seem exactly that…slight. Printing technology also favors longer forms, as the cost of printing, say, Moby Dick isn’t that much more than that of printing, say, Billy Budd–and proportionally, as a ratio of pages to dollars, printing the longer work costs a whole lot less. Combine this with consumers’ unwillingness to fork out too much money for what looks like a lot less book, and–presto!–the profit margin on novellas can be perilously low."

Replacement Press Blog, talking about novellas