My Thoughts on Novellas

My Thoughts on Novellas

I write a lot of novellas. Hopefully you’ve noticed. Hopefully you’ve read (and loved) them all.

But why do I write novellas? Why do I publish novellas?

Writing Novellas

Similar questions, with two very different answers. The first one is easy. I write novellas because I like to write novellas, and more importantly, read them. To me they are the perfect length.

From a reading perspective they are long enough to have a decent amount of meat on the bone, but short enough that you can move on to the next read in a timely manner. There’s room for some worldbuilding, but not too much, and you tend to get a tighter, faster plot. All that spells catnip for reader Bob.

As an author, like many of my peers, I struggle with having too many ideas and not enough time. If I spend too long on a project I tend to start getting the itch to move on and write something else. Over the years I have largely beaten enough discipline into me that I won’t hare off after every new idea until I finish the current, but the itch…you can’t make the itch go away. Only the new thing can make it leave, and then for only as long as until the next new shiny idea comes along.

So having projects I can get to an end in a timely manner means I get more ideas on paper. I also like writing plots. I like getting to where we’re going. I don’t enjoy writing all the stuff around it nearly as much (Character growth? Description? ugh!). Which is a reflection of how I read: I read for plot, not characters. This is why when I edit I almost always wind up with more words every draft, as I add in all the fluff.

So yeah, I write novellas because they make me happy.

Publishing Novellas

Let’s not get it twisted: I publish to make money.

I want to be a full time author, and if you think the LadyWife is going to be happy with me making a ‘living’ on the net checks his spreadsheet $5,824.79 I’ve made this year, then you aren’t showing that woman the respect she so richly deserves.

If this was a hobby, then I wouldn’t be spending dozens of hours each month doing back end stuff. I’d be writing whenever I felt like it, not every day. I’d be coasting along, just writing whatever was the most enjoyable in that moment (spoiler: it would likely mostly be ttrpg content).

But from the time I rediscovered my love of writing I knew that I was working towards doing this full time. Early on I wrote a ton of short stories. Once I realized that there was no way to achieve my goal from writing short stories, I sat down to write a novel. It took a couple years, but I got there. And as I started shopping it around, I began attempting my second novel.

Did you know that originally Bringing Home the Rain was meant to be one novel, with the two mysteries threaded together? I set out to do that, and got I think around 40k words in before I realized it simply wasn’t working. I hated it. I was have to twist and stretch the story in ways I didn’t think it needed to go, just to make it fit.

So I broke it up into two novellas, and discovered that novella length was perfect for Howard Marsh. Small, no-lives-on-the-line mysteries that can be solved by a meth wizard aren’t the type of mysteries that span 300 pages.

But novellas can be a hard sell. They are tricky to price out, especially when readers buying digital products don’t always pay attention to word count. You can get torched in your reviews many times over if you are selling something that a lot of readers feel skimped on.

That’s why I put two in each Marsh book. Two novellas are the length of a novel, and so long as I don’t get greedy on my pricing, folks don’t tend to complain. Every so often I get a review that comments on the fact that they don’t really like novellas, but they haven’t been attached to 1 or 2 star reviews, so I just roll with it. You can’t fully please everyone all the time.

Another factor is that I really prefer to write horror. That’s my comfort zone as a writer. And I genuinely believe horror works best in shorter forms. Short stories and novellas are the perfect length for horror. Stephen King? Yeah, all his best stuff is at that length. I love IT, sure, but I prefer works like Skeleton Key and Different Seasons.

Bob’s Hot Take: 70% of horror novels published today would be better at novella length.

Since I enjoy writing horror as much as I do, I prefer to write it at the short story/novella length.. But hey, I still write novels on occasion. I have one coming out in a few months, a horror novel no less. I’m not anti-novel by any stretch.

But everything I’ve said to this point is sorta just building on the first point from a different angle. I publish novellas because I write novellas. Except that’s not really my point.

My main point that I’ve spent about 900 words getting to is this:

I think novellas are the future.

Ok, that’s a little hyperbolic. I don’t think that novellas are going to become the preferred way to consume written media. The novel will still reign supreme. But, I genuinely believe that an increasing number of people are hungry for novella length works.

“Uh, yeah, sure Bob. Then why aren’t trad publishers putting out novellas more than ever?”

Well to assume that the Trads are going to be on the cutting edge of fucking anything is a fool’s errand most of the time. But guess what, they are! Look no further than Tor.com Publishing (part of Tor Publishing Group).

Tor has built a money printer off novellas. I’m talking about works like the Murderbot Diaries (Martha Wells), Wayward Children (Seanan McGuire) and Binti (Nnedi Okorafor). They put out novella length and shorter works as their primary focus. And folks are buying ‘em up like hotcakes.

You also increasingly see the trads putting out novellas from their authors as a way to keep that authors name churning in the algorithm pot while waiting on the next novel to come out. It also keeps that author on readers minds, and helps keep them relevant.

Bob’s second hot take: The way the trads price novellas is the biggest hurdle to more adoption of the form. $11.99 for an ebook of a novella? Get fucked.

Also, y'all, people's reading habits are changing. Attention spans are getting shorter. But a lot of folks just don’t dig short stories. They aren’t enough to satiate a lot of readers. Folks want a little more meat, but they don’t always want to be tied to one book for days/weeks.

Folks like completing book challenges. I see it every year, it hits december and folks who are five, ten books shy of their 52 book yearly challenge are looking for some shorter reads so they can hit their goal. Goodreads is judging them, and they don’t want to come up short. Novellas are a perfect fit.

All this is blending together to mean that novellas are increasingly trending upward in popularity, at least in the genre fiction space (which if I’m being honest is the only space I really care all that much about).

From the publishing perspective, it’s technically cheaper for me to publish a novella than a novel, since I am paying less for editing. Editing is done by word count, so I can have a ready to go product for a smaller monetary amount (since I handle covers and layout myself). This means that if I wanted (I don’t) I could have one novella come out every few months. This would keep me more active in Amazon’s eyes, which would benefit me in the eyes of the algorithm. Rapid release is a very viable strategy (looking at the 20 books to 50k crowd here), it’s just not one I’m pursuing.

So I publish novellas because I think it is, in fact, viable to publish novellas. I believe that I can make a full time career out of primarily writing novellas. I bundle them in pairs, mostly, but you don’t have to. It just comes down to a pricing matter at that point.

In summary: I write them because I love them, but I publish them because they sell, and I only expect them to increase in market share.