hello, i've been working on my story collection for about a year now, but there is something i stumbled across a few months ago that i haven't been able to solve. right from the start, i categorized the collection as "literary fiction". all of my stories are character-driven than plot-driven and are of different genres (romance, sci-fi, mystery, crime). _ however, i've been wondering whether it's appropriate to have stories with different flavors (genres) in one collection or whether it'd be better if all of these stories were under the same or similar genre. _ they all share the same theme, but i have been considering taking some of those stories and putting them into a different story collection, one, where their genre correlates much better: e.g., crime, mystery, sci-fi for one collection and romance, drama, etc. for the other. _ this is also because some stories are brutal and hardcore in comparison to others, so, it would be probably a good idea to separate them into two books. _ this is just a concept, only. i'd like to hear your opinion on it if that's okay with you. should i keep them all in one collection? _
If there is a central theme to all the stories, and the collection is marketed based on that theme. I don't see a problem. You might include genre with the story title in the table of contents, so readers can pick and choose what interests them more.
I agree with @w. bogart aside from this ^. If some stories are very reader-friendly and some are pretty harrowing you might want to separate them for that reason alone. Nothing to do with genre, but the adult-ness of the content.
Good catch, I missed that myself. At a minimum, I would give the more adult content a separate section in the table of contents identifying the reason for the separation. If there is enough content of each type, that difference would rate a seperation.
Literary fiction doesn't need to be in quotes. It's a real thing. But I'm not sure that's what you're doing here. It seems like you're working with several genres while literary fiction is basically the opposite of genre or without genre. It doesn't really matter that your stories are character driven. You can write character-driven fiction in any genre. Someone looking to read literary short fiction might not want to read all those genre stories you're grouping together. I read a lot of literary short fiction, and, personally, I'm not all that interested in reading short genre works. It's just not really my thing. In fact, I don't think grouping them all together in a collection makes too much sense. Readers have preferences. If I'm looking to read mystery stories, I'm not going to be thrilled to find sci-fi and romance stories thrown in there. Sorry, but I just don't think it's really going to work. It's important to note that when you pick up a short story collection you'll find that some if not most of the stories were previously published in literary journals or magazines. Where your work has been previously published matters when attracting agent, publishers or even readers. This is the norm. So, you might think about submitting some of your stories to journals for publication before releasing a collection. Of course, if you plan to self publish you can do whatever you want, but I still think you'll run into the same problems attracting readers.
