President Harry Truman once said, “The lessons of history we don’t learn can come back to bite us. How quickly we forget things in politics. One thing I never forgot is the 1948 presidential election. The media were all agog over New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey beating “Give ‘em hell” Harry Truman.
Welcome to the club. I never knew a writer who just sat down at a desk and a typewriter (or computer today) and wrote a perfect thousand words. We all learn the hard way: "Write one word, one sentence, one paragraph at a time.
I received a note from a writer who wishes to remain anonymous. She has submitted her book to several agents who like it but can't find a publisher. "Too short" is their response. She insists that the book is a short novel and doesn't understand the rejections.
The question has come up many times in my writing career. Frankly, there are no specific answers. One day, fiction tops the chart; another day, non-fiction does. When "Gone With the Wind" was published, writers started clicking on their manual typewriters to emulate other sagas, and so it went.