Anthologize this

If you check the bookstores over the course of this year, you might find there’s a glut of female-centric anthologies about pretty much every topic under the sun. Weren’t anthologies dead? Didn’t they not sell? Looks like that’s not so true anymore:

"I keep getting e-mails from people saying, ‘I’m putting together an anthology about early menopause,’ or ‘I’m doing an anthology about miscarriage,’ or another one about interfaith relationships," said the writer Lynn Harris, whose essay "Someone Old, Someone Blue" pops up in the recently published Sex and Sensibility: 28 True Romances from the Lives of Single Women (Washington Square Press), edited by Nerve co-founder and expert anthologizer Genevieve Field. "I’m in a bunch of forthcoming anthologies. There’s one about only children. And another one about Jewish stuff I’m part of the proposal for. I had a letter in the Hell Hath No Fury book, a book of women’s breakup letters …. Is that it? I can’t remember."

For a particular sort of female writer—one plugged into the appropriate social network, with multiple glossy magazine features on her C.V. and a few novels or a memoir in the can—a curious new task has arisen in her professional life: anthology-request management. It involves fielding e-mail solicitations for stories about [insert life crisis here], producing said story and then trying to keep track of all the anthologies one’s work appears in.

So what caused this new trend? The success of the 2002 anthology THE BITCH IN THE HOUSE, edited by Cathi Hanauer:

"[At first] it was, you know, ‘Ugh, this is too hard to sell. Anthologies—what a yawn,’" said Elizabeth Kaplan, the literary agent who represented Cathi Hanauer, the editor of The Bitch in The House. "The biggest thing was not that it sold so well, but that it was an anthology that sold that way. It changed everyone’s mind about anthologies—both the publishers for doing them and writers for being in them. Personally, it’ll be interesting to see how the others do."

According to Marjorie Braman, the vice president and executive editor at HarperCollins who published Bitch, the book had the right attitude. "It was one of those books I had a lot of confidence in from the second I got the proposal and read it. I just knew," Ms. Braman said. But she’s not sure what Bitch’s popularity means for similar collections in the future. "The problem with trends is, a book works and we say, ‘Wow, that’s great—let’s do more.’ It’s kind of like the sequel to a Hollywood movie: Maybe you’ll get lucky, and maybe you won’t. Just because one book works doesn’t mean that others will work. And publishers tend to either create or jump onto a trend and then exploit it so much that it goes bust."

I think one reason anthologies can do so well is that if you’re lucky, you get a whole host of bestselling authors whose names all appear on one cover — together! And they are writing about issues that they (for the most part) relate to and that other women can as well. But like any trend, I expect this will run its course in due time.

But it does beg the question: why can personal essays strike a chord and sell well, but short story anthologies can’t?