Short Story Collections

I think there needs to be a sense of structure and flow to it, though there are various ways to do that. Having just completed a story collection myself, this has been on my mind. Ordering them was a real challenge. There are no set rules, but I think it is wise to start with a strong story, and typically if one story is much longer than the others (or is a novella) it is the last story. Good luck!

I just self-published an anthology of my work from the last year. It's a combination of poetry, flash fiction, and narrative non-fiction, and I ended up organizing by how I wanted to set the mood of the reading experience. I toyed with organizing it by type of work, but it simply didn't read correctly. So you may consider going by how you want people to read it. I had some sadder stuff in mine, so I opened with that and lightened the mood as I went and got to end on a good, fun note.

Gayle

If you are an unknown author then it helps to have a theme. if you are a known author then the 'theme' is you - a collection of unpublished shorts by any known author would (and have in the past) sell well on nothing more than the basis of 'this guy wrote these'.

For an unknown, however, I think it helps for there to be a common theme to all the stories. It could be a shared world, a concept like emotions, a shared idea (like stories about vampires etc) or whatever. The point is that you give the potential reader as many reasons as you can to want to buy your work. A collection of Vampire short stories by A.N Author, for example, will at the very least attract vampire enthusiasts who are casually browsing Amazon.

If you're looking for a commercial publisher of any size, a collection of unpublished stories if an extremely tough sell. Even famous writers almost always compile a collection from previously published stories.

Most readers want stories in a genre they love, so commercial collections are usually all in the same genre.

I've recently put a collection of my own short stories together to sell on Amazon kindle. Mine are pretty much all the same theme so it was easy to place the book in the right category. I've only sold 2 in 3 weeks (and one of those was to someone I know!)
Good luck with yours!

Having a theme is a good idea because you can continue it, and use different themes. I am working on that as well. Self-publishing short stories is the way to go sometimes.
Good luck, and let me know how it is going.