The next book going up for Kickstarting is going to be the short story collection (I expect it’ll be around November), and I wanted an opinion. Assuming a price point of 2.99 – 4.99 for a Kindle, what’s a reasonable expectation for word count and/or story count? I personally think that it should be more than what was in the sampler, so I guess ‘six stories’ is the lower limit there, at least. Thoughts?
2 thoughts on “Could use a word count/story count opinion.”
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It depends ….
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Lois Bujold’s “Borders of Infinity” was three barely-novellas with a short-story wrapper holding ’em together. At the other extreme, Jim Butcher seems to include 10 or 11 shorts in his Dresden Files short collections.
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Left to my own devices, I’d say .. it depends. Seven and Thirteen are both good numbers.. but if you’ve got a few that think they’re novellas in the mix, three may be correct.
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Mew
For collections of short stories in general, 10-12 is about right, but there’s a significant fudge factor.
Fewer than eight, or more than fifteen, and I’m going to have questions.
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For inter-related short stories that tie together into a meta-arc plot, fewer is better than padding. Wrap it where the story ends, and don’t apologize.
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For story collections on a theme, think about how many stories on the theme you’d be interested in reading back-to-back. Because once the reader puts the book down for something else, they probably won’t be picking it up again.(Negative example: Kaiju Rising. Stories about giant monsters stomping over everything? Great! 25 of them? Who knew giant monsters and apocalyptic destruction could become boring?)