Writing A Novella Instead Of A Novel

I have officially published in draft2digital, an ebook aggregator, a few novels. Each of these novels are more than 80,000 in terms of word count. Being a relatively new author, I now realize that writing novels is hard work. It is pretty intimidating, exhausting, worrisome and frustrating.

Intimidating because every minute while I am writing the novel, I worry that my word count would not meet the minimum word count or that I would exceed my word count. In case you are not aware, readers and print publishers have requirements in terms of word count.

If you want your book to someday be published in print form, then you must remember that word count is a big issue for print book publishers. This is just something that authors need to think about and calculate whenever they are writing a book.

It is exhausting because it is not easy to type several thousands of words while you try to organize your words into coherent sentences. And the more you write, the more exhausting it is to do this.

Worrisome, because I worry that my story would be an incoherent mess. The more you have written, the more you think if all your story ideas match with each other. This is very real, even many successful authors admit that even after they have finished their book, they worry about this.

Famous Game Of Thrones author, George RR Martin, for example, admits that there are incoherency and errors in some of his writings. As a result, when his books became famous, these errors became widely known and is a concern for him.

Frustrating, because I think that all my hard work won’t amount to anything because not even one person or just a few would read my book. There is not an instant before, while, and after finishing writing my books did I not think about this.

But mostly it was very exhausting. I guess you know by now that I also write short stories in my website. They are a delight to write. Writing these short stories is very enjoyable because writing them does not require much commitment in terms of time.

And for authors, time is a very important thing. Also, writing short stories is not very taxing to one’s mental faculties. This is why I wanted to explore other forms of writing stories which does not rely heavily on very long word counts.

That is why I considered writing shorter stories like novellas. To be truthful, I should have started writing novellas because of my relative inexperience as an author. I think I should further polish my writing skills before tackling stories with more word counts.

Strictly speaking is a story that has a word count of about 10,000 to 40,000 words. Many say that it is about 100 pages once converted into a book. This is the formal definition of a novella although the minimum and maximum word count may vary from sources to sources.

For example RL Stein’s successful Goosebumps stories are novellas. They have a word count of between 20,000 to 25,000. RL Stein strictly adheres to this word count formula when he is writing mostly for children.

This is my first clue that writing novellas could also a good thing. If RL Stein can become successful writing stories which are much shorter than full blown novels, then it means that I or you have the possibility of becoming successful authors by just writing novella length stories.

Work To Profit Ratio

Perhaps one of the best answer would be work to profit ratio. Unlike writing novels, you can probably earn money for considerably less work and time commitment. You can produce more work which could mean more profit.

By being able to produce more books, you would know which ones of your books is selling and produce more of it. This is unlike writing a full blown novel which is a bigger gamble. You could be writing a novel that no one would buy even though you have spent a long time writing it.

They Require Less Investment In Time And Resources

They also take a lesser time to write and your mind is not stretched as much. As previously mentioned, you could have produced several novellas in the time it takes you to write a novel. If you are an author who have other things to do besides writing, like a regular job, you should consider writing a novella.

Investing a lot of time writing a novel can become impossible especially if you are not a full-time author. Consider how difficult it is to write a novel while having full-time employment. A novel can stay unfinished for years as you switch back and forth your brain between concentrating on your novel and work.

Compare this to novellas which are much more achievable in terms of time demands. You can write a novella in a shorter time and you would have an earlier chance to know if your book will sell or not.

The Possibility Of Getting Discovered Earlier

Since you can write a book faster, you can produce more books, which means a greater possibility for you to be discovered as more of your books circulate in the book market. This means that more people would know you if ever one of your books persuade a reader to buy more of your books and spread the word around that your books are good.

We have a successful author we can follow for this. George RR Martin took a decade before writing his first novel. This is right. According to him, he wrote short stories and novellas at first until he became confident enough to write a full blown novel.

If George RR Martin took a decade before writing a full blown novel, then it means that for a decade he supported himself writing nothing but short stories and novellas. I am not suggesting that you wait this long before you write your novel, but this is a real life example from a successful author.

One of the reasons why I stayed away from writing novellas first was because I read it somewhere online that novellas tend to be rejected by printed book publishers. According to the article, printed book publishers earn less from novellas than they from novels.

But this is simply not true, as RL Stein has demonstrated, there is good money to be made by producing printed novellas. RL Stein’s, Goosebumps novella series alone has over 400 million books in circulation worldwide.

Besides, even children’s books which contain even lesser word count, gets printed into children’s books. The lesson of the story: Printed book publishers will sell anything from a perceived bankable author no matter how little the word count of their books.

So if your idea of a successful author is one whose books are printed by a major publisher, concentrate first on becoming a successful author no matter if your story just comes in ebook form for now.

You might not be aware, but there are many famous books that are not actually novels but are just novellas. Even though they are just novellas, they have bested novels and stood the test of time.

This means that word count is not really that important. It is more important to note that it is the story and how well a book has been written that matters. These are just some familiar books that are just novellas but are famous even until now:

-Animal Farm by George Orwell
-Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
-The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
-A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
-The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

The list goes on and on. For a further list of the all time best novellas of all time, you could simply Google the search keywords: “famous novellas”. Google search results would show many articles and lists which show the most recognizable novellas of all time.

Perhaps the greatest motivation you could have besides the all time top novellas of all time is Stephen King. The master of horror writing has written well more than a hundred books. Some of these books were not all novels but just novellas.

What makes his novellas so special is that some of his novellas has beat out some of his novels in terms of fame and financial success. This just proves that even a shorter novella can beat out the novels written by an author.

And when I mean fame and financial success I do mean it for Stephen King’s novellas. Here are just some of his novellas which has been either turned into a movie or a television series. A proof that when it comes to storytelling, quality is more important than quantity:

Hearts In Atlantis (turned into a movie) The Mist (turned into a movie) Shawshank Redemption (turned into a movie) Secret Window (turned into a movie) The Langoliers (turned to a tv series)

As you can see, the successful novellas of Stephen King are not all in the horror genre. This just means that you can have a successful novella writing in any genre. There is no such thing as a magical genre for novellas.

According to online statistics; romance, suspense/mystery, general fiction and so on are the top selling categories for novellas. But in case you haven’t known this already, these categories are the exact top selling categories for novels as well.

This means that genre success is pretty much the same whether you are writing a novel or a novella. This is a good information for authors. This basically means that the taste of readers do not really vary in terms of book word counts.

Another advantage of writing novellas is that you have a more flexible pricing model. Since it takes you less time and resources to write your novella, you can sell it at a cheaper price than novels.

But don’t be fooled that just because you are selling a novella you should always price it cheaper than a novel. There are many novellas for example in Amazon that are priced the same and even higher than novels.

You could try this tried and tested strategy for pricing your novella: You could sell it at a discount price much cheaper than a novel’s price. Once your novella becomes popular, you can sell it at a higher price which could mean the same price as a novel.

One thing contributing to the popularity of novellas is the increasing time constraints on readers. We now live in a busy world and more and more readers are attracted to novellas because they can be read in such a relatively short time. Like one sitting.

And this trend is likely to continue. In the United States alone, reading literacy has continued to drop year after year. Many people are just too distracted with movies, television, comics and other forms of media to devote a lot of time to reading.

This must be due to the attitude of young people these days to consume mass media in quantities. This is why novellas are very popular in ebook form, ebook readers does not care if you have a short or a long story.

So if you are writing books for the ebook market, it would be a good time to try out writing novellas because they especially sell well to readers who use ebook readers. Chances that the person reading this article is starting out first in the ebook market. Am I right?

Writing a novella has a lot of advantages over writing a full blown novel. For one, it takes less time and resources to create one. It also gives you an earlier idea if your book would be a success or a failure.

A lot of successful author have written novellas and became successful with them. This proves that when it comes to storytelling, it is the quality not the quantity that counts. This is especially important since many people today are having a lot of difficulty finding time to read books.

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