My fifth collection of short stories, The Experience Arcade, will debut at World Fantasy in San Antonio in November.
The collection consists of twenty-four of the thirty-five short stories that I have sold from my write-a-story-a-week-for-a-year that I started in 2015. I’m trying some new approaches with this collection:
First, every story has a brief teaser for the readers, sort of like what Analog does for their short stories. Second, every story has a postscript for writers and teachers that talks a little bit about the thinking that went into the writing of the stories.
I don’t know if the additional material will make the book more interesting or not. I do know that when I was young, I never read introductions or epilogues. As an older reader, I find the extra information very valuable. We’ll see how the experiment in format goes.
I’m also creating a web page with support material specifically for teachers who would like to use any of the stories (or the entire collection!) in class. You can see what I’ve done so far by clicking on The Experience Arcade: A Teacher’s Guide in the menu at the top of the page.
My experience on how best to promote strong sales that I learned from my previous books isn’t very helpful, I’m afraid. My first collection, Strangers and Beggars, and my first novel, Summer of the Apocalypse, did well. The sales on the other books have been hard to graph. I can’t see a pattern, and I don’t know why some books do better than others (other than the obvious that maybe some books are just, well, better).
We will see.