Random House offered me a deal

Last week, I accepted an offer from Random House to publish my debut story collection: The Payoff includes my self-published novella, “Money Matters”, three other novellas that are original to the collection, and eight shorter pieces (including some that originally appeared in this newsletter).

The deal blurb describes The Payoff as “a story collection centered on money and what you do when you don’t have enough of it, following a cast of linked characters as they steal, gamble, inherit, and wed.”

I am still a bit shocked by this outcome. Large presses like Random House don’t publish very many stand-alone short story collections. In fact, it’s so uncommon that there’s remarkably little information online about how these story-collection deals actually happen. (Former agent Nathan Bransford told authors there was no point querying agents with a collection. He wrote: “If you’ve achieved enough literary success to get a short story collection traditionally published, the agents will come to you.”)

When I began my career, I used to haunt the blogs and forums to figure out the details of how various authors got their book deals. My first books were young adult novels, and in the YA world there’s a culture of transparency: authors are remarkably open about the details of their publication journey. But the literary fiction world tends to be more reticent, which gives the impression that these deals don’t happen unless you’re one of the few, one of the elect.

Last summer, I tried to describe the various paths to selling a work of literary fiction to a big press. And here’s how I summarized things:

I find that when you're trying to sell a literary novel, you need credibility—some sort of external evidence that you're a genius. That’s because literary novels can only succeed if they manage to meet the approval of a gauntlet of intermediaries: critics, booksellers, awards committees, and literary influencers like me. And publishers don't necessarily know what kinds of things those intermediaries will like. So if you come to them with some undeniable credentials—publications in major journals, big residencies, big fellowships—they're more likely to believe you’re capable of getting the attention of literary taste-makers.

When I wrote this post, I hadn’t yet gotten this kind of book deal, so I was only operating on supposition and guesswork. But now that it’s happened for me, I can at least ...