Short stories are my addiction and my permanent, professional heartbreak. I love them but they just don't sell well. Short stories, if put in a single volume and placed before the general reading public in the same way as any other book, will be avoided like a dull uncle at a family wedding. When suggesting things for customers to read I love short stories for their simplicity. My tastes tend towards the spare, controlled story that turns on those inadvertent actions that all of us stumble through everyday.I often ask if they like short stories. The answering "no" is nearly always accompanied by a distasteful wrinkling of the nose as if they had scented cabbage boiling nearby.

Sometimes, lapsing rhapsodic about a recent volume, I will get close to actually selling it to someone. On the way to the till they flip it over to see the price; catch a glimpse of the words "short stories" somewhere on the cover and suddenly change their minds; usually for something far less interesting.

I have often wondered why this is. I love short stories for their simplicity. My tastes tend towards the spare, controlled story that turns on those inadvertent actions that all of us stumble through everyday. They are cooked in the crucible of a writer's imagination until nothing but the bare essence is left. I think this sparseness reflects just how rich life is, how each passing moment is crammed full of possibilities both good and bad. A really good story leaves me breathless; with a need to stop and contemplate; and will crop up in my memory, unbidden, for decades. Why then if I am so seduced by their power do others not share my enthusiasm?

I think we have an attitude problem which starts at school. How many of us, I wonder, foster a deep and abiding loathing for one or more of the books that we studied at school? How many had English teachers for whom appreciating literature was akin to explaining a joke so that it ceases to be funny? How many started this process with a bashed up volume of short stories pulled from a stale cupboard at the back of the classroom? Enough, I suspect, to start the rot.

Critics, when they review an author's new collection, will describe it as though the author is feeding you scraps whilst they get around to writing another "proper" novel. The dialogue between publisher and bookseller is more frank. As we flip through the new books for the coming months, I will pause on a new title by a popular author. "It's only short stories," the rep will say, "You won't need many of that." Given that the book will receive the desultory review described above; and given that it will be met with the enthusiasm of the few and the wrinkled noses of the many; is it any surprise that we do as we are told and order the few copies to tuck away, spine on and almost invisible, on the shelf.

It's not all gloomy though. People can be hooked in if you use the right technique. I have learned to save my enthusiasm not for face to face encounters with customers but for the small, spare recommendation slips with which any bookseller worth his salt will declare his eclectic tastes and independence from the ubiquitous 3 for 2 offers that pack our bookshops these days. In this way I have managed to introduce a small but growing band of readers to my own favourite addiction.