Novels started from short stories?

Been thinking about this some more and just wanted to say that I've fallen in love with writing novellas lately. I think they're particularly suited to crime.

I just want to say that this is a pretty awesome thread. I didn't know that other writers actually did this too -- my novel originally began as a 2000 word short story that I wrote for a university assignment, which then, due to people saying how much they liked it, was chopped up, rearranged and used as the basis for something bigger. I'd always considered it kinda lazy, as that's 2000 words in my novel that are actually lifted verbatim from something else, but it's nice to know that it's actually a pretty common practice.

As far as rights go, I'd imagine that lifting the short story verbatim and inserting it into a novel unchanged would be a violation of rights, since you're basically reprinting the short before the rights have lapsed back to you, so I was lucky enough that I never bothered submitting the short I used as a basis anywhere. It's kind of a grey area though, isn't it? Technically a novel and a short story used as a basis for a novel are two different works, but if the novel reprints the short story word for word, then how many legal toes are you stepping on?

Hope it's okay to resurrect this thread.

I have an unpublished short story that I intend to develop into a novel.

Uncle Jim posted details (in the novel forum) of an anthology submission call that I might throw my hat at. These are the rights:

First World Publication Rights, with an exclusivity period of 12 months (with the exception of Year’s Best reprints).


In the amazing event of acceptance - do those rights mean that after 12 months, I'd be fine with submitting a novel where the first chapters are a 90% match?

WaveHopper said:

Hope it's okay to resurrect this thread.

I have an unpublished short story that I intend to develop into a novel.

Uncle Jim posted details (in the novel forum) of an anthology submission call that I might throw my hat at. These are the rights:

First World Publication Rights, with an exclusivity period of 12 months (with the exception of Year’s Best reprints).


In the amazing event of acceptance - do those rights mean that after 12 months, I'd be fine with submitting a novel where the first chapters are a 90% match?

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You might want to ask the anthology editor for clarification, but you shouldn't be restricted in any way, before or after twelve months. A short story and a novel are completely different pieces of writing. At any rate, you're only selling first rights, so you still own novel rights, and you still own reprint rights.

You have to wait twelve months before anyone else can publish the story. That's the only restriction.

Rufus Leeking said:

If you give a publication the copyright to a short story (which isn't what most contracts give the publication, but I'm just following the hypo), and that short story becomes Chapter 1 in a novel, how are you not violating the publication's copyright?

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What elements of that short story are you able to use? Say you decide to use the characters and themes in the short story but not use the story you wrote as part of the novel. In other words, change the events within of the short story but keep the characters and themes.

Are you violating copyright by using the characters from the short story?

Ocean At The End Of The Lane By Neil Gaimen Started as a Short Story

I can certainly think of some well-known SFF novels that started as short stories. Anne McCaffrey's "Weyr Search" (first published in Analog) became the opening chapters of Dragonflight, for instance.

As for copyright, I don't know enough about the issue to say what would happen if a magazine owns the rights to a short story that becomes the opening chapter of a novel. Maybe they'd have to give permission.

But many publications have rights reversion that happens after a year or so as part of their contract, which means that the author is allowed to sell their story to another market (that takes previously published work, obviously), have it appear in an anthology put out by another publisher, or in a collection of their own work. It's very common for well-regarded short stories to be republished elsewhere in the same form as the original.

I assume having it be the nucleus of a novel would be fine after rights revert too.

It was mentioned in another thread (in the past) that a member here, JamieFord, wrote a short story for Glimmer Train called "I Am Chinese." Later, that grew into the novel Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, which grew to be a bestseller.

Rufus Leeking said:

If you give a publication the copyright to a short story (which isn't what most contracts give the publication, but I'm just following the hypo), and that short story becomes Chapter 1 in a novel, how are you not violating the publication's copyright?

Click to expand...

Selling the copyright means you have sold all rights, which is what I advised not to do. You should never sell all right to anything. This is the same as selling the copyright, and when you do this, you can't use the short story for anything, in any way, forever after. Not anthologies, not collections, not novels, not film, not anything.

But good magazines never buy all rights. They buy First North American Serial Rights. After this, they buy non-exclusive reprint rights. None of this stops you from doing anything you like with a short story, or with the characters.

most magazines want to buy your story, not your characters or intellectual property