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Notes From the Buffer Zone

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Short Story Collections

Written by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Recently, a former student of mine and I exchanged e-mails about short story collections. He has sold maybe a dozen short stories. His first novel will appear in 2009. He has asked me to write the introduction to his first collection and I will, because he’s quite a talent.

But here’s the odd thing: I will write the introduction whether he sells the collection to a publisher or not.

That’s right. He might not sell the collection. In fact, he probably won’t.

Frankly, as a person who used to own a specialty press, I certainly wouldn’t buy a collection from him. His stories weren’t in the same genre, let alone the same venue. He’s been nominated for no major awards, and no one will know whether or not his novel is successful until sometime in 2010.

By the time I had sold a dozen short stories, I was a Campbell, Hugo, and Nebula nominee. I had just sold my first novel as well. But I never would have thought of marketing my first collection—even though I had a better track record then than my former student does now.

So why didn’t I discourage him? I could have. My former students come to me for unvarnished opinions. They know if they present an idea to me and I think it bad, I will tell them. In fact, I think he expected me to talk him out of the entire idea.

Instead of discouraging him, I accepted his request to write the introduction. I think he’s a hell of a writer, someone whom readers need to find, and I think a small collection will help him rather than hurt him in the long run, because the collection will remain in print.

So what’s different between his position now and mine when I was in similar shoes?

Twenty years. Twenty years and a revolution in publishing, one that benefits everyone, not just the writers, but the readers as well.

Twenty years ago, there were as many if not more specialty presses. I know, since my husband and I started one. We had a line of books called Author’s Choice. Author’s Choice was a series of short story collections. The premise was that the authors choose what they considered to be their very best work. They would write their own introductions, and we would publish the book.

The line was successful despite the fact that it ran against the common wisdom of the time. That wisdom stated simply that short story collections don’t sell.

In the larger scheme of New York publishing, that wisdom is still true. The sales figures for the short story collections of New York Times bestselling authors are always smaller than the sales figures for those same authors’ novels. Major publishers still look on a short story collection as something they do because the Big Name wants it, not because the collection will sell well.

When a midlist author convinces the New York publisher to publish a short story collection, it can often mean the kiss of death to the midlist author’s career. Why? Because New York functions on numbers. If an author’s book sales increase from book to book, then the author is “growing” and therefore desirable. If the sales decrease, even on one book, then the author is “in trouble” and not worth the risk.

What this means for the reader is simple: Your favorite author can disappear from the bookstore shelves if her numbers decline. She might be (like me) someone who uses a multitude of pen names, in which case she won’t disappear, but her name (the name you may know her under) will.

Why, then, would any writer want to publish a short story collection?

Well, partly because all of the short stories that we publish have such a short shelf life. I can’t tell you how many requests I get for my award-winning novella, “Recovering Apollo 8,” from fans who have heard of it but haven’t yet read it. I send them to www.asimovs.com to order a back issue, but someday Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine will run out of back issues. At some point, I will see if www.fictionwise.com is interested in carrying “Recovering Apollo 8,” for download in various e-formats.

But for my readers to find that story, they will have to either know about Fictionwise or contact me to see where they can find the story. Eventually, even the most dedicated reader will stop searching.

That’s where a short story collection comes in. Not only will the collection provide the reader with a shelf copy of a favorite story, but it provides other stories as well, stories that the reader will most likely enjoy, considering they’re by the same author.

And if the reader likes all or even half of the short stories in the collection, then the hope is that the reader will seek out the writer’s novels. I get fan mail on almost all of my short stories. Most end with some kind of favorable remark about my novels—or the fact that the reader will go buy my novels now that he has discovered my short stories.

So the question is, really, why aren’t more authors demanding short story collections?

Well, aside from the New York numbers problem, there is also the specialty press problem. There are only so many specialty presses, and not all of them buy short story collections. When they do, they buy the collections from established pros, not newcomers.

Even people like me, a bestselling writer with a long history of award-winning and award-nominated short stories, must propose a short story collection to the specialty press who, like their New York counterpart, will then run the numbers. If the press believes they can make money from my collection, they’ll buy it. If they don’t, they’ll kindly pass.

The economics of specialty presses are different than the economics of Big New York publishing, which is why you’ll find excellent collections by writers like Lucius Shepard and Howard Waldrop in the specialty press when their novels from New York are nonexistent or out of print. Writers like Shepard, Waldrop, me, Connie Willis, and Mike Resnick have a dedicated fan base who will buy almost everything we write. That fan base isn’t large enough to get us on the New York Times bestseller list, but it is large enough to sell collections at good if not excellent specialty press numbers. And that doesn’t count the collectors, who often buy everything a press or a writer puts out, adding to the baseline numbers of the collection.

Specialty presses are a godsend to those of us who love short story collections.

But, as I mentioned before, there aren’t enough specialty presses to accommodate all of us with proven sales records, let alone those who haven’t proven themselves yet. And specialty presses often do limited runs, so once the book is sold out, it’s gone.

Those of you who are paying attention will note that I told my former student a small collection that will stay in print will benefit him. Yet I just told you that collections are almost impossible to get through New York publishers and even the specialty press, which likes the occasional collection, will put that collection out of print.

So am I delusional? Was I lying to the poor man when I told him he had a good idea?

No, because his plan—if he couldn’t sell the collection to a reputable press—was to publish the collection himself.

Twenty years ago—hell, ten years ago—I would have told him self-publishing was career suicide. Self-published authors were usually victims of scams. Their books couldn’t be distributed through the normal channels and as a result, the poor writer spent thousands of dollars for books that never made it into a bookstore.

Some of this changed as Amazon grew. Amazon didn’t mind having a self-published book on its website, so long as they didn’t have to warehouse it. Then print-on-demand came about. Several presses, from Wildside to i-Universe publish only those copies ordered, at very, very small numbers (often) or large numbers (very rarely). The demand determines the print run, not the other way around.

Which seems only logical, right? Demand should determine press run. But in major New York publishing, print run is usually an educated guess. Most specialty presses set a maximum number of copies to encourage the collectors to buy. So in the larger world of publishing, print run determines demand.

Print-on-demand books print only the books needed to fulfill orders. Because there is no inventory, a book can remain in print forever, if the printer/publisher and the author agree on that.

Then add the worldwide web. Technology has grown so rapidly that an author can offer her own books for sale on her website and ship them all over the world, if she so chooses, without doing most of the work. Many of the print-on-demand publishers include shipping costs in the price per book.

So, let’s say, my former student publishes his own collection. He puts it up for sale on his website, and gets orders from all over the world. He sends those orders, along with the delivery addresses, to the print-on-demand house he has chosen for his book, pays that house per copy, and it prints, binds, and mails the book for him.

The customer pays the author full price for the book. The author then pays the print-on-demand publisher the cost of producing and mailing the book (usually 35%). The author makes 65% of the cover price, instead of the usual 6-12% off the cover price of a New York published book.

The author won’t make any money up front, but he will make more money over time than he would if he went to a specialty press.

And—bonus!—his work, his short stories, are always in print.

By now, some of you have checked my website (www.kristinekathrynrusch.com), and have noted that as of this writing, I have nothing for sale on that site. I point my readers to occasional specials offered by my publisher or some local bookstores, but I am not marketing my work myself.

Why not? Was I being hypocritical when I told my former student he might benefit from self-publishing?

No, I’m not being hypocritical. I plan to find a way to market most if not all of my short stories through my website. So why aren’t I doing it now?

Because, honestly, it’s overwhelming. Unlike my former student, who has a dozen or so short story credits to his name, I have hundreds. And they’re all in different formats on various computers that lie around my office. The stories from the last 15 years or so are all in my current files, because about 15 years ago, it became easy to update files from one format to another.

But I started publishing back in the computer dark ages. In those days, my children, I actually got a secretarial job because I knew how to turn on a computer. I kid you not. I wrote my first short stories on a typewriter. Some of my best early stories were written on an Apple //e. Most of those files are long gone. I would either have to scan or retype those stories.

It’s a lot of work, work I don’t have a lot of time for. I prefer to write new stories than to futz with the old ones. So I have to get over my natural inclination toward new work to figure out what to do with the old.

That doesn’t count deciding which print-on-demand publisher is best for me, and what program I should use to set up my store on my own website (not counting, of course, learning how to use the software to set up that store).

The amount of work is mind-boggling. It is also, as I told my former student, a generational thing. As it stands right now, I have published only four short story collections—one of them on audio. I want to do more. But while I work to stay on top of cutting edge technology, I often find that using it can be both time-consuming and daunting.

This is a problem that exists only for the long-established professional writer. The newer writers, those who got their start in the last 5-10 years, don’t have to worry about it. It’s a problem I’ve never seen before in publishing, the problem of abundance.

Too many opportunities, and too little time.

It’s not a problem for readers, however. Readers have the world at their fingertips. Literally. If readers are completists, like I am, they can find any book they want, anywhere, provided they are willing to pay a premium. I use www.bookfinder.com at least once a month to find an out-of-print book. I order half a dozen or more books per month online (in addition to the books I buy at brick-and-mortar stores), and I learn about books I didn’t know existed from various websites, including the author’s own.

Sometimes I read stories on line. Sometimes I buy entire collections for one single story—collections I hadn’t known existed, until I saw them online. Sometimes I track down back issues of magazines. And often I find what I’m looking for on Fictionwise.com.

That doesn’t count all the audio short stories. Places like www.escapepod.com and www.drabblecast.com all provide short stories for your ear, well read and well produced.

Honestly, I think my former student is better off self-publishing his own collection. He is slowly building an audience. When a reader discovers him twenty years from now, that reader will be able to get a copy of my former student’s first collection without searching all over the web for it.

Providing, of course, that technology doesn’t change as drastically as it did in the past twenty years.

Although it probably will change, and change a lot.

In that case, my former student will end up just like me—struggling to keep up, and enjoying every single minute of it.

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