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I was having a conversation with Efdumb the other day, and he suggested I might want to put some of my stories into a collection for sale on Kindle.
Its a good idea, but I am stuck on what stories I would pick. I mean, it would probably take 10 stories to make up a decent sized book, and my stories don't tend to be connected to each other directly, so how would I select the stories?
Any ideas, anybody?
Comments
An idea!
It is a collection of YOUR stories, so make it an Anthology.
Don't let someone else talk you out of your dreams. How can we have dreams come true, if we have no dreams?
Katrina Gayle "Stormy" Storm
Best of
My thought would be, The Best of Dorthy Colleen. Choose the stories that have had the best response (reads, Kudos, comments). You might add your own recollections on what inspired you and what surprised you in writing and response to story.
The stories don't have to be connected
May I humbly suggest that you visit your local library and peruse the books there. There are bound to be some collections of short stories that you can use for inspiration.
One collection that comes to mind is Collected Short Stories by D.H. Lawrence.
Amazon has a deal on the kindle version of one of them
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Selected-Short-Stories-Thrift-Editi...
£1.79 on Amazon UK.
I remember studying these stories (cough-cough) almost 50 years ago. Some are wonderful comments on the social history of the time.
Then.... you will have to decide which comes first and which comes last. That won't be an easy decision.
Themes
Find themes to link the stories.Holidays, costumes, magical transformations, everyday life, or whatever.
Book idea
Dorothy:
The AVERAGE book tends to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 to 400 pages. With approximately 8 to 12 words per line, 60 lines per page, this works out to about 600 or so words per page, or roughly 200,000 words per book. Your average story runs about 1600 words, so you'd need about 50 to 75 stories for your anthology, plus any anecdotes/vignettes you wish to include, to have a novel-sized anthology. I'd simply go down the list of what you've written, INCLUDING your blogs, as they give insight to you as a person. You could call it Dorothy's Diary or something similar. Good luck!
*kisses*
Haylee V
*Kisses Always*
Haylee V
actually length of a book
is almost always displayed as word count, as the typeset, font, size of page, illustrations etc can have an effect on how many pages are in a book. So as far as how much you need, think in how many words, not how many pages.
Here's a guide for what is considered industry standard for word length.
500 words or less is flash fiction
1000 - 8000 words is a short story
5000 - 10,000 Is a long short story
10,000 - 40,000 is a Novella
More than 40,000 is a novel but most run a minimum of 50,000 words
Depending on the genera the maximum word length comes into play. Young adult novels usually run between 50,000 to 80,000 words. Most adult novels run between 60,000 and 110,000 words. Sci-fi and Fantasy novels normally run between 90,000 and 120,000 words.
That's not to say there haven't been novels that are longer, Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard is just shy of 430,000 words in length (the longest single novel I have read)
We the willing, led by the unsure. Have been doing so much with so little for so long,
We are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
That ain't a big book
These are big books
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_novels
Enjoy :) :)
Two Options
You can either put a bunch of stories together that all have something in common and give the collection a theme, or put a bunch of stories together that are all different and sell your collection on variety.
go with a theme?
go with a theme?
but remember what you post to there, has to get erased from here for posted as free and a long time?
Proud member of the Whateley Academy Drow clan/collective