Are you ever going to collect all the short Ethshar stories in one place?
I’d like to. There are a couple of problems with the idea, and a couple of possible solutions. The first problem is that single-author collections generally don’t sell worth a damn these days. No one’s interested in publishing books that don’t sell, and I don’t particularly want to see a book with my name on it not sell, because it might hurt sales of subsequent volumes. One possible solution to this is to have the collection published by a small press, rather than a big New York house; I think this is a viable approach, but it does mean the book would be relatively hard to find and wouldn’t exactly make me rich. (You do understand, of course, that the underlying purpose of Ethshar is to make me rich.) And then, of course, there’s the second problem: So far, the short stories don’t add up to an entire book. They total maybe 45,000 words, and these days book-buyers want 80,000 or more. The obvious solution is to write more of them, and I might do that. A possible solution to both proble
