"Allison Amend is no Dan Brown" —Gina Frangello, editor of OV Books

She meant this as a compliment. She meant that my short fiction is "language-driven" (read: occasionally experimental) "cerebral" (read: overly intellectual) and "clever"(read: ditto). In short, not commercial. My stories have no movie tie-ins (though I believe that golf-dramas are underrepresented in Hollywood, that is the subject of a different essay), no hook, no real-life inspiration. Just stories.

Chances are my career is just like yours. I got my MFA. I wrote stories. Then I wrote some novels. I continued to write stories. I had publications in many excellent literary journals, and spent a few years indulging in colony-hopping between freelance and freshman composition gigs.

Fast forward ten years, two unsold novels later, and my collection was still the little engine that almost could. It was selected as a finalist or a semi-finalist in so many contests that I stopped putting them on my resume. It even won first-runner-up in the Prairie Schooner's Book Series Prize (especially infuriating, since my usual defense—"those idiot judges wouldn't know a good collection if it walked up to them and hit them over the head with a National Book Award"—didn't work; I mean, they came this close to choosing me.)

Enter Gina Frangello, an editor of OV Books who had twice championed my collection to finalist status in OV Books' contest. OV Books (former publisher of Other Voices Magazine, in which I had published two stories) had recently been acquired by independent conglomerate (oxymoron alert!) Dzanc Books. In response to Dzanc's editor Dan Wickett wondering when my work would finally find its publisher, Gina asked to see not only my collection but "everything you've ever written." She was able to diagnose my collection's problems, and, after jettisoning a few stories, asking for rewrites and commissioning a new piece, Things That Pass for Love was accepted for publication.

Gina's recommendations, and her confidence that there was an audience for my writing, helped me realize a collection is more than just a bunch of stories held together with a clever title. No, they don't necessarily need to be thematically linked, nor do they need to have characters that populate more than one story, but they do have to have some coherence to make them stick together.

Here are some pointers I've gleaned from preparing the manuscript for publication:

1. Order matters. I do not cook. And I have never understood why you need to mix the dry ingredients together before you add the liquid ones. But it makes a difference. Similarly, the order of stories in a collection adheres to some alchemical rule. Just as a story that starts in the wrong place feels wrong, a collection that is out of order just feels off, which is all the excuse an editor, looking to winnow the pile of excellent manuscripts, needs to dismiss yours.
2. Just because it's published doesn't mean it belongs in the collection. Putting together Things That Pass for Love I reluctantly shelved a few stories that had found good homes in literary magazines. They just didn't belong in this collection. They were the "outlying values"; the quiz scores that get dropped before designing the bell curve. They were great pieces by themselves, but they were soloists, not chorus members.
3. Pick a title carefully. Throughout graduate school, I joked that my collection would be called Soporifics and Other Solipsisms. It was a joke. But then I called my collection From A to A for several years. I still like that title, but it's soporific and solipsistic. Was the title the reason my collection never got published? Doubtful, but it does say something about the collection as a whole, that it was self-indulgent and a creation that belonged too much to me, that couldn't stand by itself, that had no theme other than "I wrote all of these."

Here are some things you probably already know, but are worth repeating:

4. Enter contests. It's a pain, but it's a really good way to get your collection out there. Find a place to make inexpensive copies and enter anything that has publication as a prize. It was my first-runner-up award that spurred Gina to take another look at my collection, and it wasn't a bad credit to have on my resume.
5. Look for independent publishers who like story collections. With notable exceptions (Hannah Tinti, Yiyun Li, Amy Hempel...) mainstream publishing is not going to buy your collection. It's not smart to look for mushrooms in a desert, but the forest, on the other hand has fungus under every fallen branch. (Just to clarify, mainstream publishing is the desert in this analogy).
6. Be patient/lucky. It's taken me ten years to get this thing out there. I could list another dozen writers who've experienced the same delayed gratification, who figured their short story collection would live in a box under their bed and then were hit with publication like a ton of National Book Awards falling from the sky. I found an editor who is also a friend and colleague, who has devoted countless hours to my humble manuscript, who will be thrilled at any amount of copies I sell, who is championing it not because she expects to make money off me but because she believes in my work and in short fiction in general.
7. Write novels instead. I'm only half-kidding here. A story collection is a little bit of a contradiction. Stories encourage experimentation and divergent styles; collections by nature discourage these qualities. It's that much harder to create a whole; though the rewards, of course, are myriad.

Things That Pass for Love (www.dzancbooks.org/OV/thingsthatpass.html) will make its publishing debut in October, 2008 from OV Books. It is not written by Dan Brown.