The book I read long ago, WAS NOT A NOVEL! It was just a story about a girl who wanted to become a folk singer. Not a long story; not a novel at all.

You mean it was a short story, in a magazine or a collection of other stories?

I asked eight people today when they go to libraries or book stores are they looking for "Novels" and all replied, "No", they either look for fiction or non-fiction sections of the book store or the library!

I've no idea what distinction you're making. Nobody would have labelled anything as a "fiction book" in the 1960s. You can't insist that publishers 50 years ago should have described their products the way Amazon does.

"Novel" means there was only one story between the covers, "short story" means there were more. That's all there is to it. (Length is secondary - some short novels are shorter than some long short stories). Which do you mean?

Finding a short story is a lot harder, since indexes won't often describe the stories in a collection separately.