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The total number of stories I believe depends on what the purpose and focus of your book is. For my dreamland articles I chose 12 each as a nice healthy number since they were all small stories of about 12 pages each. hehe. Sort of a math puzzle of sorts. Plus it sounded about right. However, with my Dark Years Chronicles, the total number of stories in each was only about 3-4 due to their larger, almost novelette size. Some people have put as many as 30 into an anthology. So there's really no "rule" persay for how many go into a book.
Take this example for instance. Did you know that "Gone with the Wind" isn't actually a novel, but is instead a short story anthology? I read somewhere that the book itself is comprised of some 30-50 short stories that stitch together neatly to form a larger story. So in the end, I would simply look at all the stories you want to put into the book, decide on what grouping of them would be the best, and go with that, regardless of the number that you come up with. The only thing I caution you on is pagecount. When we originally released my Dreamland Articles, it was only 125 pages. In hind site, if I were to do it again, I'd probably expand the stories in it a bit more if I wanted to keep the same story count, or else I'd have to add about another half dozen in order to fill out the book a bit better and make it more appealing visually. Well, at least in the paperback version, although page count does still affect people's buying habits when it comes to ebooks too.
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