There’s an interesting thread begun on SFReader about how one goes about pitching a collection. It’s brought up some interesting comments and stimulated my thinking, so I thought I’d bring a compilation of my words over here and see what y’all have to add.

~~~~~  ~~~~~  ~~~~~

I believe the big publishing houses would consider a collection of assorted genres and characters as too scattershot – remember, they’re looking for repeat customers. They aren’t buying one book from an author – they want a career. Careers are made by addicting readers. If readers love a first novel, that’s what they’ll want to come back for. The conglomeration approach sounds somewhat risky to me.

Small press, too, usually fares no better with collections. Novellas (standalone or in collections of 3 or 4) will typically do better than collections of a number of short stories. The difference with small press is that the small press authors are most recently come from small press-heavy venues and their reader base consists mostly of those who found them via short fiction. Offering an addictive character or world at least gives the existing fan base reason to follow along and purchase.

Three years ago, I didn’t read collections. Not unless they came from big named authors (Zelazny, Vance), and even then, very rarely. I did read an occasional anthology, but I enjoyed novel-length fiction most. Still do, to be honest, but now I read much more short fiction and I think there is both a growing need and home for it. I think collections have a good chance of picking up steam within today’s societal norms and I think that we – all small press publishers and authors – should be heavily pushing them.

There are two advantages in collected short fiction that I see:

The first is convenience. The speed, ease, and manageability of access, climax, and completion can’t be beat. The closest competition would be magazines, but they come with misleading covers and advertising – banes to reading enjoyment.

The second is chance. The opportunity granted the reader on every story to love it, hate it, skip it, reread it. And then move on to the next one. Novels don’t allow the reader to do that. They’re pretty much all or nothing prospects. The anthology/collection allows the reader to stop reading whatever he/she doesn’t enjoy and move on to the next entry. Such collected short fiction allows the reader to experiment more, to get more for his/her buck, to taste more of what’s out there.

What are the two most bemoaned characteristics of today’s generations? Short attention spans and the need for instant gratification. Both advantages answer both of these traits. With money getting tighter and daily giving less reason to spend it upon printed words, I think that there is more than a good chance the buying public will discover short form fiction bound in longer formats will give them more bang for the buck then they once thought. And when that happens, RBE will be right there.