Publishing is an industry not so much guided by reality as it is by truisms. The classic truism is a simple one: "short story collections don't sell anymore." Ah, anymore. Now there's the qualifier. My agent has heard that from various publishers and dutifully repeated it to me this past year. Of course, H. P. Lovecraft heard much the same thing back in the 1920s. He just missed the Golden Age of "a few years ago" as well, it seems.

Despite them not selling at all, I regularly find myself reading collections. In fact, I find it rather hard to avoid them. I was randomly mailed a review copy of Gene Wolfe's Starwater Strains, which isn't selling in classy hardcover a few weeks ago. On my own I picked up Dogs of Truth by Kit Reed, which won't sell in inexpensive and convenient trade paperback form. Animal Crackers, by talented mainstream author Hannah Tinti, sold so poorly in hardcover (and in Spanish, Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan and other languages across thirteen foreign territories) that its poor publisher decided to punish itself further by releasing a trade paperback edition.

Trade paper too rich for your blood? Hell, even Dorchester, Home of the Whopper, has published collections by Tim Lebbon, William F. Nolan, Jack Ketchum and others. Seven bucks people, seven bucks. Available in CVS. So then, as Mr. T might say, is all this jibber-jabber about collections not selling?

Well, there are two models for author career path at play here: the genre model and the mainstream model. In the genre model, one writes a bunch of short stories and sells them to small publications that seem large only because genre authors live at the bottom of deep wells. Then one writes a novel, and then another, and another, and they come out every year or every six months and they generally all stink because one writes in the same way one makes McDonald's toadburgers, and then one gets famous (because people love to put diseased shit in their mouths) and then one comes out with a collection of short fiction for one's fans.

In the mainstream model, one pouts over and struggles silently with blank pages in one's dorm room for four years, then goes out and "lives" by doing things like waiting tables and driving trucks and chillin' in Africa. Then one comes home and takes out massive loans in order to pursue a Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing. At the MFA program, one is taught by the unpublished how to teach the unpublished though the dubious mechanism of writing short stories. These stories are bundled in a collection and sent off to publishers, where thanks to the connections and privilege cultivated in college and grad school (certainly not those cultivated while "living"!) it is accepted, contingent on the writing a novel. One's novel stinks, mainly because one has no experience writing novels, but that's good enough for tenure, so one takes his or her place on the faculty of an MFA program and the mystic circle is thus complete.

So we actually end up with a lot more short story collections than one might at first suspect.

Recently, a third model has emerged, and it has emerged within genre writing. Wildside/Prime has been at the forefront of publishing debut fiction collections by writers like Tim Pratt, Holly Phillips, and Dora Goss. Other small and independent presses are following suit as well. How can these publishers do it if these new-ish writers don't have a dedicated fan base? Easy: it's because short story collections don't sell!

The very worst thing that can happen for a small press is to sell a lot of books, mainly because sales are not permanent. Books are returned by bookstores if they don't sell, and quickly. Sometimes, they're returned and just re-ordered the next day. That's a real neat trick the great fulfillment houses and bookstore chains have mastered, and as they are the only game in town, it's rather inescapable, like you giving me your lunch money after I corner you in the hallway outside the cafeteria.

The solution, of course, is to sell books that bookstores won't carry – like collections, which don't sell. Thanks to the wonder of small print runs and digital print-on-demand, it is very easy to make money on a book that doesn’t sell by reducing the risk of publication. Low-to-no inventory is key. Print 1500 copies or, none at all until orders come in, and you're off to the races. A small handful of people buy these collections, and if the reviews are good, sales to libraries (who don't return books, and who don't demand the steep discounts wholesalers and bookstores receive) make up the bulk of the rest of the sales. If a publisher moves 1500 copies, rejoice, for that is about as successful as these collections get. At least these collections are mostly made up of reprints, so the small royalty checks can be filed under Found Money for the author. And many more short story collections for us.

As this is a column about reading, and not publishing, I guess I should get around to answering the question: "What collections should we read, Nick?" Well, the answer depends on your answer to the following question:

Do you like short stories?

There's really no reason to read a short story collection if you don't like short stories. I mean, it's stupid, really. It doesn’t matter if it is a collection by your very favorite author, if you don't like short stories, you're rather bound to be disappointed. Indeed, for all the marketing and career positioning and fancy covers and crazy pricing schemes and author blogs full of dimwit commentary about the President and eating toast, the only people who read collections are people who like short stories. If you don't like a specific short story that's fine, as it will be over soon and another one will come along. That's pretty much the secret to liking short stories. Anyway, here are four good recent collections to start you off:

20 th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill (PS Publishing) – Joe Hill writes about inflatable pals, magic flying capes that don't inspire childlike awe and wonder, woebegone horror anthology editors, and crazy Jungian fever dreams with a rare confidence (and the occasional sour note, especially when writing teen protagonists). Excellent.

The Shadow at the Bottom of the World by Thomas Ligotti (Cold Spring Press) – a career retrospective by the weird tale purist. Only one previously uncollected story, the darkly comic "Purity", but as you've likely not read his previous collections (they didn't sell either) this is a good place to start.

The Body Parts Shop by Lynda Schor (Fiction Collective 2) – a themed collection of surreal and hyperreal stories of perfect tits, male pattern baldness, and the rippling muscles of Tarzan.

Beautiful Blemish by Kevin Sampsell (Word Riot) – here's a collection you'll actually find in bookstores, at least if you live in Portland, Oregon where author Sampsell is on the staff of the Mecca of independent bookstores, Powells. The nasty fucking of senior citizens and dead houseplants are the surprisingly entertaining highlights of this collection

Good luck finding these titles, you'll need it. After all, short story collections don't sell. Like my agent said when I asked her to market mine, "Please kill me."