| Re: Shoert stories
Yea, shorts are a tough sell to publishers, especially if you are an unknown... Hell, I write them and I have only ever bought two anthologies, Clive Barker's Books of Blood and China Mieville's looking for Jake... and I have yet to finish them!
The problem with shorts for the reader, is that you invest your time and your connection with a chartacter for very little pay-off... it's over in less than 5000 words, sometimes even quicker, as a lot of magazines like their shorts around the 2000 word mark.
I feel very lucky, especially reading this thread, to have a collection coming out next year with a small press, and even then, the prologue for my novel project is going in it, to give a taster and hopefully encourage an upsell to the novel.
The publisher was only interested because most of the shorts have appeared in print already in the shorts market, and because I was introduced to them with a couple of novel projects on the go... I wouldn't have approached a publisher with a book of shorts if this opportunity hadn't come up. |