Short, sweet, and sometimes difficult to sell
on short story collections
Literary fiction writers are familiar with hearing, “short story collections are hard to sell.” Something I was wondering recently is, how many unagented writers submitting their story collections to agents know that publishers financially value literary short story collections less than novels? I’ll discuss “hard to sell” and its caveats below the paywall, but putting that aside: when a literary story collection does sell to a publisher, that publisher’s P&L1 means that they’ll (most likely) be offering the author a smaller advance for the story collection than they would for a novel. I wasn’t sure if this was common knowledge or would surprise some MFA grads…