I would like some advice on how to pull this off. My plan is as follows: 1. Finish the novella I'm currently writing (not to exceed 40K words); 2. Publish the novella together with 5 previously published short stories in a single volume. Why do I want to do it this way? First, because it's very difficult to get standalone novellas published traditionally (unless you're already famous), so I need to pad out the volume with something else. Second, because I want to rescue these stories from the small-venue limbo where they currently reside. So, first I have the question of how to go about querying for this combination of unpublished material and previously published material. A further problem is the copyright issue. The 5 stories appeared in two different publications, one of which went out of business years ago. I have no idea where the former editor is or even if he is still alive. The novella and a couple of the stories can be categorized as SF/F. Grateful for any advice.
Without some big credits to your name it's going to be hard to sell a collection to an agent and then a publisher. Agents follow literary journals, especially ones that would represent a collection. If the agent hasn't heard of any of you're publications, they're just not going to matter too much. The contracts for the short stories you've had published should spell out the terms of rights. It's usually that the rights revert back to the author after publication, but that's not always the case, though, there usually is some timeline about this in the contract. And you usually say where the story originally appeared when it's reprinted in a collection. A novella might be a harder sell, but I don't think it's an impossible sell on it's own. If you want to try selling the novella on it's own, you might want to look into some small presses. But if it's good enough, there's a chance you could still land an agent. Good luck!
