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I know for a fact that - it's just the way our biases work now in the industry of literature, but certainly a short story collection does not receive the same kind of attention as a novel.

You know, it's sort of common wisdom among New York publishers that short story collections don't make money.

Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark... your words come out, and then nothing... but I don't think that's why I tend to write novels rather than stories.

I've never really thought of writing books. I've never thought about stories as a part of a collection.

But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels.

Authors can easily produce ebook versions of novels and shorter work which publishers don't own.

I've seen novels that have grown out of one story in a collection. But it hasn't occurred to me to take any of those stories and build on them. They seem very finished for me, so I don't feel like going back and dredging them up.

It is a good idea to know which publishers publish which stories. For example, there is no sense in sending a picture book text to a publisher who does not publish picture books.

When I started writing, the deal was that publishers gave you a grand or two as an advance to buy some sweets, with the promise that they would make a big putsch with your fourth book when you'd built up a bit of a following. But by the time my fourth book came out, previously unpublished authors were the new big thing.

I don't collect books just because other people collect them, and I'm not going to have books in my collection if I think it's badly written.