Novella or novel?

I guess it depends on two things:

1) How you will be publishing. From what I hear, novella's aren't an easy sell to traditional publishers. But what you said about novella's being successful on ereaders makes sense too. If you are planning to self-publish, who cares what traditional publishers do/don't pick up?

2) What is the reason you wrote a novella in the first place? Is it because the story functions best that way, or because you wanted to be brief, heard it was a successful length, etc.?

Your story need only be as long or short as you deem fit.

I understand wanting extend the story into sequels and prequels these days, but, my first concern is the truth of the story and whatever page length or word count it takes to achieve that clarity is what you should ultimately be aiming for.

Good luck...

Alex

To me it comes down first to quality. I haven't read your work, so I have no idea how good it is. If it turns out that the first isn't truly ready, then that will make it all that much harder to get an audience willing to go for all four. I've seen an awful lot of people kill potential series because they sent the first book out (in whatever format) before it was ready.

ssgttyo said:

In addition to that I saw several sights saying many ereaders today are buying novellas for the cost and the casual reading (it was explained to me that the "casual reader" meant somebody who reads a little a day and to whom a full novel can be a daunting task).

Click to expand...

People seem to be converging on making ebooks as small as possible, since sales depend on number of titles rather than size of any individual book. After all, you can't see the size of an ebook unless the seller explicitly lists it. Some sites do advertise word counts, but others publish 'novels' as short as 15000 to 20000 words. Some sites make no distinction between 1500 word short stories and 75000 word novels. You may not find out until you've already paid for the book.

Ink and paper publishing doesn't work well with novellas because each book involves fixed costs that are only a little less than the cost of producing a full sized book. Buyers are reluctant to pay $14.95 for a book that's only the thickness of three stacked pennies, but they'll pony up that much for a book an inch thick.

Combining novellas with short stories, or two or more novellas, to make a full size book, is a common enough strategy.

I don't like the idea of padding a novella to make it a novel. But then, I'm not a fan of the industry's obsession with word count limitations and quotas, so maybe I'm in the minority on this.

If you can get your novella under 17,000 words, I believe it's eligible for the WotF contest. I think that some magazines, such as Asimov's, are open to novellas, also. And there are anthologies. Check Ralan's.

You can self-publish it, and use it as a way to help build your reputation among indie readers. Hugh Howey's first Wool was a short story which got him something like 30,000 fans. Howey later collected his Wool stories (which ranged in length from short to novella) into an Omnibus, which became a best-seller. If you're planning sequels, this might be the best way to go.

What genre is your novella? Some genres and sub-genres, like romance, erotic romance and erotica, are friendlier to novellas than others. Many of the publishers in these genres will take anything from 20k and up, some even less, and do not require agented submissions. My novellas range between 30k - 40k, which seems to be a very popular length with erotic romance readers, as are series novellas.

If you fall into one of these categories, do your research to make sure you find the publisher that best matches your goals for your books. Unfortunately, openness to novellas seems to be much more limited outside of the above examples. If you decide to self-publish, I would suggest spending an ample amount of time in the self-publishing section of this forum and getting advice from the people who have been through it and can give you realistic expectations.

I agree with Beachgirl that novellas can be easier to sell to epublishers, especially if you're writing in the romance genre. My 35k romance novella was picked up by an epublisher, and I get the feeling it's becoming a more popular story length.

For traditional publishers, novellas can be a hard sell for a variety of reasons having to do with how well they sell as standalone books (not well, usually), distribution and production costs, etc. However, novellas are commonly published as part of short story collections, which is a potential way to go if you've got other short things in the works. You'll see "Whatever and Other Stories" as a title fairly frequently, especially for modern literary fiction.

For e-books, yes, that's all a non-issue. Lots of my clients put out work that's relatively short. You just probably wouldn't want to charge too much for it -- if people feel they didn't get their money's worth in terms of how long the book lasted them, they'll let you know in your Amazon reviews.

Considered splitting the "4 part novella" into 4 novellettes instead? I don't know how long it is, but you could try selling them as 7.5k-10k chunks for 99 cents or something?

Just an idea.

I think that if your Novella collection can exist as a cohesive story, then combining them into a Novel is an excellent idea. Especially if it will be easier for you to publish it, and make money. However, if they do not, perhaps an online publisher is the better option, as some above have advised.