I can't help you much with traditional publishing, but I'd like to point out we live in the best time in history to be a writer, and there is now also the opportunity to self-publish. You can write a novel or shorter piece of fiction, design a cover (or buy a pre-made cover), and publish it tomorrow on Amazon for free.
You can self publish some of your works at the same time you're working to get your best stories accepted by traditional publishers. You can even self-publish under one or several pen names, so your success with erotic space opera doesn't scare off Random House. 🚀😳
Most book sales today are ebook sales. If you want to offer readers the option to buy paper versions of your self-published books, Amazon has an amazing machine that will print a paperback copy of your book on-the-fly when someone orders one.
Getting your self-published books noticed by potential readers can be a problem, but there are strategies that can help. For instance, Hugh Howey offers the first portion of his Wool series as a free download, so readers can try before they buy the rest.
Bundle the 2 short stories together and offer them free on Kindle. Since you won't be just doing this as a temporary promotion, Amazon will probably charge you for the service. But it will be an excellent promotion for your two books. You can offer the ebooks for $2.99 each.
Hugh Howey still offers the first part of Wool for free, and look what it's done for him.
I enjoyed it but then again, I didn't know anything about it going into it (including the hype which is why I might have not been disappointed). As an ebook, it's free and it's only 58 pages so you can judge for yourself: