Sell it twice, but...

(A slightly different version of this post was published on my SubStack) The late James E. Gunn (Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Kansas) once said that when it comes to writing, "Sell it twice."In other words, sell a short story. Then either write/sell a bunch more in the same "universe" and bundle them together. Or turn the short story into a full novel. (Many writers have expanded a short into a novel. The most famous that comes to mind is Orson Scott Card's "Enders Game.")

Then take that collection of shorts or novel and sell it.

Presto. You've sold it twice.

I took that to heart when I wrote 13 short stories in my "Space Cowboy" universe. Six of those stories were already published in different anthologies. When I bundled all 13 together and sent the manuscript to Raconteur Press, they said "Sure. We'll publish that."

Ah, but there's a catch. First of all, I like to think I know my place in the writing world's ecology. I'm just a wee fish in a very big pond. So, I hesitate to hand out writing advice as if I were an "A" list writer.

With that in mind, I'll note that I've learned a good lesson about bundling a series of linked short stories into a single collection. Maybe my experience will be useful to someone else who wants to sell their shorts twice. (And no, the idea of selling your shorts like an "Only Fans" is not what I meant.)

So...The conventional wisdom for multiple novels in a series, is to make it easy for anyone who picks up the middle book of a trilogy to get up to speed on the necessary back story without an intrusive info-dump.  (Your mileage may vary if you like info-dumps).

The same is true if you sell a series of linked short stories.  If they aren't all in a single volume or published near simultaneously, you may need to remind readers of certain continuing elements in this "universe."  For instance, if you have a talking cat that sounds like Humphrey Bogart, you may need to remind the reader that the cat talks and who he sounds like in each story.

But, when bundling these stories together as a collection, you need to consider removing or minimizing the repeated info.  You don't have to give the whole backstory on the cat because you already did that in an earlier story included in the same bundle. You might say "of course" but it wasn't something I thought about when I bundled all the stories together for a collection. I just pasted them all into a single document in chronological order. (There's more to the story, but that's sufficient for my point). 

Thank goodness I had a great copy editor who caught a ton of unneeded reminders in each story. And it's something I'll be mindful of in the future since I plan to keep selling stuff twice. Or three times, if I can get so lucky.