Short stories and poems alone are rarely profitable. In a world where we can buy entire novels for as little as $0.99 (or even download or check them out at a library for free), there really isn't a price point that makes sense for a standalone poem or a 2,000-word short story. You'd have to charge pennies, at which point it raises an issue of why you're charging at all when you would need to sell hundreds just to buy a cup of coffee. When those shorter works are combined into a collection or anthology, though, the volume of material suddenly becomes more worthwhile for a consumer because you're not just trying to get them to buy that 2,000-word story; you're trying to get them to buy 50,000 words' worth of short stories... and if you can put together a novel-length offering, you can change novel-length prices without offending consumers with a higher price point.

Bundles are more appealing to consumers. This is particularly popular among self-published authors, but the idea of bundling some of your works together is certainly not new. For series writers, you can often find an entire boxed set of the series when it's finished, or perhaps the first few books in an ongoing series available together as a "starter pack" of sorts. Janet Evanovich's books retail around the typical hardcover price of $27.99, but you can also buy a hardcover omnibus edition of her first three Stephanie Plum mysteries for $28.00. For a penny more, you're getting three books for the price of one hardcover! And self-published authors are keen on this too; independent supernatural thriller author J.F. Penn sells most of her ebooks for $4.99 each, but you can buy the first three ebooks in her ARKANE series for $6.99, which makes them a much better value. People love good sales and hefty discounts, so providing them with one in the form of a lower-priced collection or anthology is a great way to hook them.

It might not be your collection. Lots of writers get their start in publishing with shorter pieces in other peoples' publications. It might be a poem for an online magazine, or an editorial in The Atlantic, or a short story published in Analog or the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. For many authors, the initial hurdle of having their first piece of writing published is overcome through the inclusion of their work in other people's anthologies or collections.

Good collections have a common thread. The worst collections I read are the ones that have no rhyme or reason. These are the ones that seem like the author just took a random assortment of short stories, copied and pasted them into the same book, and sent it out into the world. Good collections have some kind of common thread that connects the smaller works and gives the reader a feeling of consistency throughout the read. Common threads can include, but are certainly not limited to: a sequential number of works (like the first three books in a series), genre (all the stories are sci-fi, or romance, or horror), subject matter (each story is about a crime, or ghosts, or set in the same small town), and/or thematic (all of the works explore an idea or concept that's important to the writer). If you're assembling a collection and you want it to really stand out, make sure you can identify the common thread and aren't just tossing a bunch of stuff in a blender and expecting a bestseller to come out.

Good collections are a good value. Whether we're talking about a bunch of short stories and poems or a few novels, make sure the reader is getting a good value for their money. This is especially true in self-publishing where you can regulate your own pricing; you need to make sure you're offering your readers something that feels like it's worth their time and money. If you sell 75,000-word ebooks on Amazon for $4.99 and then suddenly want them to pay that same $4.99 for a collection of short stories that's only 10,000 words long, it's going to create a perception problem with the way you expect your readers to value your work.

Good collections are consistent. Another major problem I see in some collections is that they're wildly inconsistent in the kind of material they include. I've seen collections that include everything from 99-word micro fiction to novella-length stories, and everything from everyday crime to supernatural crime. As a reader, it can be really off-putting to never quite know what you're going to get from a story or even a whole collection. Am I about to read a hundred 500-word stories, or am I about to read five 10,000-word stories? Are these crime stories about bank robberies and kidnappings and murder, or are they about superhumans and aliens and ancient evil curses? When you offer your reader a collection, you want them to instantly be able to recognize what that anthology is about and they need to be reassured that their expectations will be consistently met.

Good collections have variety. This might seem a little antithetical with my previous point, but there are two things I want to say on the topic of variety. First, you need to give the reader some kind of variance in the kind of stories you tell. Horror is great, but if they're all haunted house stories, it gets old fast. Erotica is great, but if they're all boss-and-his-sexy-secretary stories, it gets old fast. There needs to be enough variety to keep surprising the reader with each new entry in your collection. Second, you can vary the type and style of material you include, as long as you're organized about it. There's actually nothing wrong with including a 500-word short story in the same collection as a 10,000-word short story, or a supernatural crime story in the same collection as a regular crime collection... but strongly consider incorporating some kind of organized structure so that readers know what to expect. Maybe the stories progress from shortest to longest, or maybe your collection is broken up into sections where all the regular crime stories are in one section, and there's a clearly marked delineation between that and the supernatural crime stories in a subsequent section.