To kind of echo what Cog said, you may want to see about getting the individual stories published in magazines first, and then later put them together for self-publishing (bearing in mind the whole 'getting my rights back' thing). At worst, it would delay things a bit; at best, you could get some useful feedback and an idea of how well the collection would sell (not to mention some income from the original sales).
Yeah, I tend to agree on that: publish individual stories first. Not necessarily stories you plan for your book, but side projects, or things you write on a given theme, or simply something that inspires you. Having a bibliography in your curriculum is always a plus, even if you never make it in the "writting world". There are thousands of magazines, contests, etc. both printed and electronic out there, and many have open submissions. Ignore those which ask for 10$ submission fee and send to others (at least 'till you have a good curriculum=name, and you are confident enough in your writting so that submission fee is not a meaningless waste of money). There is also a distinctiom between "book of short stories" and "a short story collection" which most people don't get. It's pre-plan versus post-organization: having a premeditated structure for your stories versus trying to organize stories you've already written/published. Also, some publisher will have a problem if you include pre-published atories in your collection. But then again, you won't have to worry about that if you self-publish or (what I usually recommend but people just give me blank stares) if you take time to find a small but reliable publisher...
short story collections almost always include some previously published ones, so i don't know what publishers you could be referring to, bb... have you seen that in the submission guidelines of some houses?... can you recall which ones? plus, i've never come across 'book of' and 'collection' being defined as being two distinctly different entities, but am always open to learning something new, so can you please point me to where you learned that? any info you can provide on these issues will be much appreciated... this old dog is always happy to learn new tricks that i can pass on to mentees and clients... hugs, m
I guess I got "lost in translation" there: what I called a "book" you'd call a "cycle", the only true difference being that the German term "Buch" covers both cyclic and sequental and classic novella-type structures. but the main premise is the same: a book/cycle has either a pre-determent structure of interconnected stories, through shared characters, themes etc., or (from the writter's point of view) this structure emerges through the creative process (it does not necessarily pre-dates the creation of stories themselves). I think it suits the OP's idea more than just "collection" - which should also have some sort of internal organization, no question about it, but this can be more subtle, down to simple thematic correspondence between individual stories. I'm more inclined, personally, towards a more rigid macro-structure in short prose, but there are great anthologies out there (for example, any collection of Kafka's stories is necessarily an anthology). The fact about publishers not being too keen on re-publishing may not apply for all publishers and every writter - and of course you are going to include some stories already available in print - but it's still a question of who owns the rights to your story, and for how long, after it's once published. And also, someone with a relatively modest bibliography benefits greatly for delivering new and fresh work to the publisher. Recycling old stories (except if they were EXTREMELY succesful) is not the greatest way to impress
in the us and uk/commonwealth countries, authors don't normally sell all rights to their stories... i can't even think of a case where that was done... though it may be different in germany, if that's where you've been published, bb... here, the author would always be the 'owner' of the copyright, unless they signed it over to someone else, for some reason... only limited publishing rights are sold to whatever publication wanted to feature them in their magazines/journals... after the period they have exclusive publishing rights in has expired, you are free to do whatever you want with your own work... which would include reprint rights being sold to another venue, such as a book publisher, for a collection...
Oops hey guys, sorry for the late reply, I've been really busy with crap unfortunately. Thanks so much for the replies, I've decided I'm going to go with trying to get some stories published first, something I hadn't considered before. I'll let you guys know how it goes
