How I Found a Publisher for My Short Story Collection

By Yu-Han Chao, author of Sex & Taipei City

Everybody says story collections don’t sell. “Editors don’t want story collections. Not unless you’re Stephen King.” Agents say, “I like your stories, but call me when you have a novel (translation: and not until you have a novel).”

I grew up in Asia, where the short story (and the super-short story—one that ends at the point of maximal impact) is a form that’s popular, alive and well. I studied literature at National Taiwan University, and was a huge fan of Aimee Bender (The Girl in the Flammable Skirt), Angela Carter (The Bloody Chamber), James Joyce (Dubliners), Edgar Allan Poe (The Fall of the House of Usher), and Pai Hsien-yung (Taipei People). I came to America for an MFA in creative writing, where I learned to write short stories and workshopped them with my peers for three years.

Somewhere along the way I started hearing the whispers, murmurs. Sure, short stories were great for sending out to journals (back in the day, we had to snail mail them out in big manila envelopes, with a self-addressed-stamped-envelopes enclosed for those teeny-tiny rejection slips). One could get publication credits from stories pretty easily, but story collections were supposedly nearly impossible to publish in book form. Pretty much you have to win a contest (which is almost as hard as winning a lottery), be famous, or maybe it’s a two book deal and your other book is a novel.

Very few of us got this memo, it seemed, because almost every fiction writer in my program submitted a short story collection for their MFA thesis. Now, I do wish I had learned more about novel writing, but I’ve since had over a decade to work on that, and the rest of my life to rewrite and polish up any number of my novel manuscripts (there are a couple, ranging from mystery to chick lit to martial arts novels).

By the time I graduated from Penn State with my MFA, I had a thesis collection of stories that I was determined to “sell”. Angela Carter, my all-time favorite author, had her first book published by age 25. I wanted that, too, I naively told myself. Filled with hopes and dreams, I started submitting to contests and open reading periods.

Within a year of graduating I did win a contest (that came with a publishing contract) hosted by a small press, but after five or so years of waiting, things didn’t work out in the end. I was back on submission. When I looked at the pieces again, a lot had to be changed. I had newer, better stories to replace weaker ones, and some lines, paragraphs, or pages simply had to go.

At this point I had also found publishers for a poetry collection and chapbooks, so I had a better idea of the nebulous publishing black hole I was tossing my work into. If I went through a round of submissions (a year’s worth of reasonably-priced, relevant contests and open submission periods) with a manuscript, and didn’t get so much as a semifinalist or encouraging email, the manuscript needed work. Maybe overall revision, alternate arrangement, different stories, tighter thematic link, better dialogue, rounder characters, etc. If I started getting finalists, honorary mentions, that kind of thing, I knew I was close(r).

This manuscript ended up close to finding a home several times as I sent it out in different, sometimes desperate rearrangements and combinations of stories. At one point I had a ghost-themed, chapbook-length story collection that was a Gold Line Press finalist. At another point the manuscript contained only female main characters. Eventually, gender and sexuality (and the inequality and violence inherent in these designations/roles) emerged as a connecting theme, with Taipei, Taiwan (my hometown) as the main setting, and I had the manuscript, “Sex & Taipei City.”

I submitted to a few more contests and open reading periods, and of the two presses that eventually expressed interest, I went with Red Hen Press, for the excellent/random reason that my Taiwanese father once told me that the very first English book he read in his life was The Little Red Hen. In addition, my mother had just passed away, and I had a feeling that the contract was a “gift” from her, from beyond.

After so many years of revision and paring down, the nineteen stories in Sex & Taipei City were all very short. This may have been the result of extreme editing during periods of self-loathing, but I am a believer in the ideal of “no unnecessary words”. The short story form is designed to be such a perfect little self-enclosed universe that everything in it must be tight. I loved the form, loved reading it, and had spent decades working on craft and revision.

So what does all this mean?

In short, if short stories are your genre and passion, keep writing, keep revising, and keep submitting. Try different things—revision, themes, threads, varied arrangements, shared worlds. Publishing can be like dating (with lots of blind dates and ghosting), but one match is all you need–that one publisher will see something special in your manuscript and want to take a chance on you.

Keep working at it, and the day will come.

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Yu-Han Chao was born and grew up in Taipei, Taiwan. She received her MFA from Penn State, taught at UC Merced, and is a newly minted Registered Nurse. The Backwaters Press (an imprint of University of Nebraska Press) published her poetry book, We Grow Old, in 2008. Dancing Girl Press, Another New Calligraphy, Imaginary Friend Press, and BOAAT Press published her chapbooks. Red Hen Press published her short story collection, Sex & Taipei City, in April 2019; you can read the first story for free through Amazon.com’s “Look Inside” function. She blogs about writing and nursing at www.yuhanchao.com.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing