Having Fun With Collections

Going to Do Seven or Eight…

I had ten collections planned for my 70 books in my 70th year. I did two earlier in the year, then just forgot about these others until Allyson at WMG reminded me a few months back and told me they had them on the schedule to be published toward the end of October.

Oh, oh…

I have so many short stories, I have a couple of issues.

First, I can’t remember what a story is about without looking at it. Second out of a choice of around 300 short stories that are already in print, mostly in Smith’s Monthly, or other WMG publications, and thus already copyedited, how do I pick just five or six? I have a spread sheet so I can do sorting easily of all of the stories. Just flat overwhelming.

Also, even more overwhelming is that I have six or seven live collections, but I have ten other collections that I did very early on in indie publishing with PowerPoint covers and such and those were taken down to be redone and rebranded about five years ago. And things happened and they never got redone. So now I am looking at those, maybe doing a new introduction, new cover, and adding new stories and changing out others.

So they won’t be the same collection, but by having the original collections as a base, I makes things even more complicated for myself.

So I am having fun and even found one story from an old collection that was never in Smith’s Monthly. More than likely I will find more.

Plus working on finishing a new novel.

So right now, with about a month and a half to go in the challenge, I have published over 60 major books. These collections will kick me past the top I hope. We shall see. But at least it will clean up one mess that has been hanging out there for five or six years now. And will get me up to a total of about 15 live collections.

I have over 300 short stories that could be put in a collection easily, so by that math I should have over 50 collections at 6 stories each. More if I only do 5 story collections. But I will take 15 for now. Not counting the big collections I have done as well, such as the 100 short stories I did two years ago in three volumes and the Colliding Worlds Collections I did at the start of this year with Kris.

Feels good to finally have some collections out on the market. But doing eight in one week. A little over the top, even for me. (grin)