Sell Your Short Story, Part II
How and Where to Publish Short Fiction
Welcome back to Shelf Life, where it snowed the other day. It is good and truly winter. Like not meteorological winter, but emotional winter. Let us all hope it is the winter of our discontent.
Last Thursday’s Shelf Life was about what to do with a short story you have written. Naturally, you can put it in a drawer for later revision or possibly never to see the light of day—but what if you want to publish it? Sell it, even? Much of the available querying, agent-finding, and publishing advice out there pertains to novels. Short stories aren’t novels—writing a short story isn’t like writing a novel, and selling a short story isn’t like selling a novel. For anyone who has written—or is thinking about writing!—a short story, and wants to know what their options are for selling that short story, read on.
Belay that—first, read Thursday’s Part I if you haven’t already. Then read on. In Part I I discussed how to sell your short story to a periodical or an anthology, which are, in essence, the traditional methods of publishing a short story. These are the methods in which you submit your short story to an editor—as you would a novel to an agent and then to an editor—for them to select your story for publication at their expense. There’s one more “trad” method—in fact, the actual trad method—and then I’ll cover some self-publishing strategies for the short story author.
Publish a Short Story Collection
The Trad Method
When publishing people say “trad publishing,” we mean publishing one’s book through a traditional publisher—a publisher who pays the author an advance and/or a royalty in exchange for the right to publish and distribute a book created from that author’s manuscript. There are many traditional publishers out there, big and small, corporate and independent. Trad publishing need not mean one of the “big five” US publishers (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster). It means any publishing company that follows the traditional model—any publisher that is neither a vanity or a hybrid press. (Read a Shelf Life on the different types of publishers.)
Plenty of traditional publishers publish collections of short stories. These differ from an anthology in a key way: An anthology is made up of stories by different authors whereas a collection is made up of short stories by one author. If you’re interested in traditionally publishing your short story not in an anthology with other writers, you’re going to need more than one story. You’ll need a full book’s worth of them.
A short story collection is similar to a novel in that it must be within the appropriate word count range in order to interest agents. This range is about 40,000 words at the very minimum to 80,000 words maximum. While page count isn’t nearly as meaningful as word count, I looked up a number of short story collections I’m familiar with and found all of them in the 200 to 300 page range—about the same size as a midsize novel. Only you know how long your short stories tend to be but twelve to fifteen stories is a good target number for a collection.
Once you have your collection together and ready to query, you can start contacting agents who rep short fiction. Anecdotally, I found 91 agents in AgentQuery who rep short fiction, out of 961 total agents in their database—so approximately 10 percent.
It may not be enough to query someone who reps short fiction. You prioritize agents who rep short fiction and specialize in or prefer the genre in which you’ve written your short stories. For instance, if they are science fiction short stories it may not be fruitful to query an agent who reps short fiction if everything else they rep is contemporary literature/upmarket/women’s fiction/beach reads.
As with novels, there are also publishers of short story collections that accept unagented submissions, typically indie presses and smaller publishing companies. They may not be open for submissions at all times, but when they are open to submissions you may submit your short story collection directly instead of going through an agent. Some presses that accept short story collection submissions unagented include:
Just a few to get you started—there are plenty more out there if you go digging.
The Self Method
What if agents and publishers aren’t for you? You can always self-publish your collection of short stories just as you might self-publish a novel.
Just as with a novel, you may choose to publish only in one venue—for instance, on Amazon using the KDP program—or in many, using an intermediary like IngramSpark or BookBaby. You will decide whether to publish an ebook, a print book, or both, and whether you will record an audiobook as well. Depending on the venue you select, you may need to create digital EPUB or printable PDF files of your book, supply a cover, and provide your own ISBNs.
If you’re self-publishing a collection of short stories, the process is not at all different from self-publishing a novel. The only material difference in the book itself is that, instead of chapters, your book is divided into stories. There is a tremendous amount of guidance for authors who wish to self-publish their work available on the web, so I won’t try to reiterate all that here. If you’re publishing a book-length collection of short stories, you can follow any available guidance you find on self-publishing a novel—the technical details are the same.
But what if you want to self-publish just one short story?
Publish Your Short Story Independently
First, there are some agents who will rep short stories individually and help authors place them in major markets like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Sun. That said, a writer is most likely to secure an agent’s help placing individual short stories if they have a preexisting relationship with that agent. It’s unlikely you will find an agent willing to consider a pitch for representation of individual short stories—unless your earlier short stories won the Pulitzer or the Pushcart or something. Then, maybe.
So let’s say you’ve got a short story and you want to self-publish it, but it’s not anything like the length of a full novel. What are your best bets?
If you have a single short story now but intend to write and publish more in the future, Kindle Vella may be exactly what you need. Kindle Vella is designed as a serial publishing platform—that is, a platform to publish a manuscript by chapters or episodes, one chunk at a time. You can begin a Kindle Vella publication with one short story and add new short stories to the same publication as you write them. To participate in Kindle Vella, you will first have to be a KDP Publisher (sign up for KDP) and you must reside in the US.
If you want to publish a true one-off, the truth is the lower limit for a KDP publication is 2,500 words—many short stories will hit that length and could then be published as a Kindle book. Be careful how you price your short story, though. Many self-published novels sell for $0.99 on Amazon, which is the minimum list price KDP allows. If you charge the same for your short story as other writers charge for their novel, you may find it a difficult sell.
There are also websites that specialize in publishing short fiction or publish short fiction alongside their other business. For instance, Medium, best known for publishing articles, also has a wide array of available short stories to read. If you participate in the Medium Partner Program and set your story as eligible to earn money, your story may earn money based on readership and engagement.
If you’re not concerned with earning money from your short story and you’re rather looking for a ready audience to read it, you can publish it on any number of sites that host short stories that are free to read. Some of these include:
Another option for those who want to get paid is to create a Patreon, Ko-Fi, or Buy Me a Coffee and release your short stories to members as you write them in exchange for their donations or membership fees. Author Kameron Hurley, for instance, has a Patreon where she releases one short story each month, which members enjoy for as little as a $1 per month membership fee.
Finally, you can use a digital download site like GumRoad to sell your story directly to readers. To do so, you’ll need to create a digital product from your story, like an EPUB file for use on e-readers or a PDF file for use on computers and tablets. Then you upload it to your shop, price it, and release it for sale. Users can purchase the story directly from GumRoad, which handles the transaction, takes a fee for their work, and then delivers the digital file to your reader.
I say “finally” above because that’s about the end of the way I know of selling short stories. However, I’m sure there are plenty more ways to sell short stories that I don’t know about. As I learn about them, I’ll write about them—but I certainly welcome information from anyone who knows. You can always ping me about writing a guest post.
In the meantime, get to writing those short stories. The journey of a thousand novels starts with a single word.
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