Last week I got notification that my short story collection wasn’t a winner in the 2010 Prairie Schooner Book Prize Series. A disappointment but not the end of the world. I knew it was a long shot. The winner was “Destroy All Monsters” by Greg Hrbek, who has an impressive literary resume that makes me look like a penny dreadful pulp writer in comparison. (The title was also used for a 1968 Godzilla movie, so go figure what that prize-winning shot story collection is all about.) Why did I enter this contest that I have no hope in winning?
If you’re a short story writer, you will eventually put together a short story collection. Entering a contest like the Prairie Schooner Book Prize Series is a good motivator for putting a collection together if you have enough short stories to exceed the minimum manuscript requirements. I got a postcard about four months before the contest was opened for submissions in January 2010. I pulled together a 186-page manuscript with 27 short stories from 2006 to 2008, with the shortest being 350 words and the longest being 6,000 words, that I extensively revised before adding to the collection. Along the way, I learned how to be a better editor of my own material. Some of the revised short stories saw publication after being rejected a dozen times each before. That made the $25 entry fee a worthwhile investment.
Besides, who doesn’t want to win a $3,000 USD cash prize and book publication?
The biggest challenge to putting together a short story collection is that there’s very little information available on how to actually put one together. Short story collections today are the bastard children of the publishing industry. The days of writers making a living on writing short stories are long over. Most publishers will not consider a short story collection unless you have several novels under your belt (or dead but we won’t go there), and even then will reluctantly publish one if only as a teaser for the next novel. Short story collections are about as idiosyncratic as their authors when being put together.
When I put my short story collection together, I kept each short story stapled together in a three-ringed binder. I used a 3×5 card with the title, word count and short description for each short story. The sorting process was the hardest and most important part. Alphabetical (too many titles started with “The”) and chronological (suck more to suck less) sorting orders were ruled out immediately. I ended up splitting the cards into four broad categories (family, people, spirituality, weird) and shuffling them together. I further re-arranged the binder to ensure a proper balance with alternating categories and length sizes. When I was satisfied with the sorted short stories, I put the final manuscript together.
That arrangement worked well for me. But keep in mind that some editors and/or readers will reject reading unrelated short stories that don’t have an overriding theme to tie the whole collection together. I selected these stories from the first two-and-a-half years that I started writing, representing my “literary” period. After I put this collection together, I went on a non-stop “speculative” writing bender that will form my next collection for the 2011 Prairie Schooner Book Prizes Series. The collection will fly or sink on the whims of the evaluating editor.
What will I do with my current short story collection manuscript? Nothing. I’m still circulating the unpublished short stories to find a home for them. Although I could find a publisher to publish the collection by myself, I’m going to hold off until I have an agent for my first novel that I’m currently working on. Since I started to selling my short stories to anthologies, the contracts often contain clauses that the short stories can’t be reprinted for a three-year period. Timing becomes a huge factor. Having an agent to double check all those contracts and perhaps negotiate waivers will be useful. Of course, winning a contest is a good way of getting the attention of an agent.
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