Write short stories. Editor Alan Rinzler discusses why book publishers love short stories.
From the piece...
Book publishers take chances on new writers
Agents and editors search these literary journals and magazines for new authors. And every year publishers take chances on new writers who aren’t particularly famous yet, but end up surprising everyone with a big hit.
For example, Farrar, Straus and Giroux just this year published Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, a debut collection by Wells Tower, which has been highly praised and is enjoying good sales.
It’s true that agents and publishers hope that the short story writer will also produce that blockbuster novel. And it happens.
Annie Proulx, author of the short story Brokeback Mountain which originally appeared in the collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories, also won the Pulitzer for her novel Shipping News. Richard Ford, who wrote the short story collection A Multitude of Sins, also wrote the novel Independence Day. Michael Chabon, author of the short stories A Model World, wrote the novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
Short story collections can sell very well
Sales numbers can be big enough for short stories on their own. There are many successful examples each season.
Just this year, Random House sold around 329,000 copies (according to BookScan, which captures about 70% of all cash register sales) of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for the set of 13 linked short stories about a grief-stricken family set in a small town on the coast of Maine.
That should give every short story writer a boost.
And in the same period, Vintage has sold around 210,000 copies of Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri Jhumpa’s collection of related stories about the fate of immigrant Bengalis in America, since publication in April.
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