Writing Art and Craft

This has been the week for getting helful rejections from markets.  The latest said essentially, "great world-building, and get to the story sooner."  Which means the voice, writing and world-building wasn't enough to hold the editor's interest.  There is a bit of driving to the story, and it's there to introduce the reader to how the story's world is different from our contemporay one... so I guess I need to take a quick look at the manuscript from a craft POV.

Over the weekend I went to a Self-Publishing on Amazon workshop.  There was a ton of information, and what I took away from it was, 

• short stories probably work best on Amazon as marketing freebies;
• an anthology of short stories would work best with the same characters in all stories and with an over-all story arc
• I probably need to choose a different pen name for each genre I write in because Hell Hath No Fury Like An Amazon Reader Lead Astray By A Cross-Genre Author.
• Amazon Readers want strong characters they can identify with over story plot over world-building.  
• Amazon Readers read differently than physical book readers. 
• It's all about keeping a steady stream of novels coming out.

I looked at the anthology of my various stories and realized it would be a mis-step the way I've got them arranged currently:  it's a mix of high fantasy, science-fiction, urban fantasy reprints -- I could probably sell it to super-fans once I had built a following, but currently I'm not at that point in my writing career.  

Insert my Great-uncle Conrad's Cautionary Translation-Of-The-Bible Story here.