Middle-length fiction (10,000 – 60,000 words) has been a rarity for much of the last century. There were few avenues to publish it because it was too short for a traditional book and too big for literary magazines. Occasionally, you would see a novella or novellete featured in an anthology, combined with a few short stories to make a salable novel-length work.
But with the rise of electronic fiction, the roadblocks against middle-length fiction are falling away. It is just as easy to buy an individual short-story as it is to buy a novel. So why not be able to buy stories that fall between the two traditional lengths?
One of the challenges that remain is helping the reader understand what the length of a story is. In printed media, we could look at the number and size of the pages and know how long the story is. But with electronic fiction, the number of pages varies depending on font and reader size (e.g. Kindle, Nook, iPod).
One solution to this is letting potential buyers of fiction know the number of words. Thus the reader will know whether the story is a short story, a novella or a full-length novel.
Of course, pricing of e-fiction is all over the place. You can get a decent e-novel for free or buy one for $14.99 or more. So where do short stories and novellas fit into this? Who knows? There doesn’t seem to be a per-word price point. But there is nothing to suggest that short and medium-length fiction can’t be a equal player in this twenty-first century world of literature. If the story is told well, it will sell.
Maybe they could standardize on how many words constitute a page. Knowing that a story was 15 pages long, for example, would be more intuitively easy for me than knowing that it was 3,750 words.
I never really thought about it, but you’re right. Novellas may finally have a steady market. This is exciting.
It’s hard enough for me to think about selling my work, much less breaking it down into inventory units. But once I force myself to overcome the mental hurdle of commoditizing the products of our hearts and minds, I believe your idea of price per word is absolute genius. This is how consumers comparison-shop everything else, after all. I wonder who would set the starting point. Amazon, I suppose. And what it would be?
Katharine,
A lot of artists have a resistance to selling their work. Perhaps we feel it cheapens it or that we’re selling out or even that we don’t deserve to be paid (even if we do).
The way I see it is that being paid for my work affords me the opportunity to create more. We each have our own motives for creating and most of them are valid, including creating as a means for working through a past or present trauma, creating as a way of sharing our truths, and creating as a means to sustain ourselves.
But we are not limited to a single motive. We can heal and earn a living. We can share our truths and enjoy the act of creation. We can entertain and change the world.
I never really thought about it, but you’re right. Novellas may finally have a steady market. This is exciting.
Well, I think Jim Butcher recently sold a novella as part of the Dresden Files, called Backup. It is essentially a short story from Thomas’ perspective, Thomas is Harry’s vampire half-brother. But I’m not sure I would call this a novella, because it looks more like YA fiction for 10 year olds. [I haven't read it yet and I know it is supposed to be an adult story, it just doesn't look it.] Small, 70 pages in like a YA font, and with some b/w pictures. Sure, those pictures were done by Mike Mignola of Hellboy, but we aren’t talking a graphic novel either.
It’s hard because without a novella market, people always think they are getting a novel, or close to it, especially if they buy online. Which is what happened to me. I was ok with a novella, but $20 for what I got? Yikes. This novella should have been closer to $10. Very misleading and overpriced.
Publishers and writers just don’t know how to effectively market anything other than a full-length novel, and that actually runs the risk of pissing people off. I love Jim Butcher, and I appreciate his run of comics for the Harry-verse, but I was still not happy with the cost and size of this produt. If this had been an e-book and the cost based on word or something, something cheaper, I’d have been more ok with it.
He comes out even though, because he has several Harry Dresden short stories on his website for free. I do love Jim!