Publishers Accepting Short Story Collections...

Duotrope does allow a search based on short story collections, though the results are rather paltry.

Look up...

the websites of Small Presses and Indies and epubs. Quite a lot of them do handle short stories.

I don't know, but I don't feel like most short stories start out in a collection published for the author. Most of them probably start out in magazines/newspapers/third-party short story anthologies, etc. A collection of short stories seems kind of hard to sell unless you're a big name author, so I doubt that many publishers are willing to do it for someone who doesn't have a name attached to themselves that the public will recognize.

You could try a querytracker search-there is an option for searching pubs/agents who accept short story collections.

In the old days...

pre-ebooks a short story collection was usually a collection of published stories plus a couple of new ones.

Now there are companies who are epubs only and want unpublished short stories for downloads to mobile phones, ipads and ebook readers. They take 'em singly and then, sometimes, if they sell well, offer the author's stories in a collection.

TWB Press is an American epub looking for SF, Fan, Supernatural, Horror and Thrilllers. www.twbpress.com

I know of a few people who've had collections of shorts published by Salt Publishing, and another through Pewter Rose Press. I believe that all of them had established themselves through placing in respected short story competitions and literary short story outlets first, though.

Before I was able to get a publisher for my collection, I had over 100 shorts in print. The current collection contains 19 previously-published stories (including those nominated for prizes) and 2 new stories.

If you don't have a name or a following, you need to have some publishing credits. Even then, a collection is a hard sell to many publishers because it is a hard sell on the shelves.

Yes, there is the straight-to-ebook route, but again unless you have a customer base, you will be asking yourself where are the buyers?

Best of luck. Seeing the stories in print first time around was a thrill - not to mention getting paid - but seeing them in a collection is also a thrill, although the getting paid part is not exactly NY Times bestseller stuff!

Kate

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