Definitions
Authors, such as Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Shirley Jackson, H.P. Lovecraft, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut, or Stephen King, often started out with short stories. Often, writers may not make as much money as they would like, so sometimes they decide to write short stories for magazines, such as Playboy. After a while, such short stories, many often unpublished, may accumulate until the author decides to release them into a feature length collection, so their readers can experience the stories at one time, rather than accumulate them all individually. Short story collections are a very economical choice for a writer who is suffering from "writer's block", mainly because they cost little time and money. Other books cannot qualify as "short story collections", because they contain few long novellas. A good example is Four Past Midnight, which contains a mere four stories; however, the stories are about 200 pages each, so books like this, although a collection, nonetheless, are not a "short story collection".
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