: Re: How many short stories make a collection I would like to know, from someone who has marketed a collection of short stories (or is otherwise knowledgeable in these affairs), about how many short

@Kevin153

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My rule of thumb: Publish when the paperback is thick enough to put a readable title on the spine.

I use CreateSpace for my paperbacks. For CreateSpace, you need a minimum of 110 pages to put text on the spine. That gives 1/8" of room for the title. That's maybe an 11 or 12 point font (assuming all caps or small caps with no descenders), which is pretty darned small.

So I figure a minimum of 130 pages total, including frontmatter and backmatter.

The amount of text you need depends on a bunch of parameters that affect page count: trim size, font, font size, leading (aka line spacing), margins, paragraph length, amount of frontmatter and backmatter.

I know numerous writers (including me) who publish collections with 5 stories. My one collection (so far) has 27000 words, including 24000 words of story content, an introduction for the collection, and 300–500 of author notes for each story.

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