(Because usually I have the opposite problem, clocking in SFF tomes of 130K to 160K, which must all be pruned.)
Anyway, I’m glad the reader liked the book. I was a little puzzled at first, when they mentioned, “The book is too short” And I fired off a generalized funny tweet about it.
Dear reader, sorry my book was too short. Do you know what a novella is?
— M'Lady Disturbing (@MCHana2) April 14, 2016
I’ve seen this before, from readers who call short stories ‘novellas’ or ‘novels’. My inner accuracy wonk squirms a bit, because all of these forms have their limits. They are not interchangeable. Some topics are best served within Twitter’s 140-character-limit zing. Some in vast novels. Some works can never be fully encompassed, even in huge series. In the past, I’d fall back on a sanctimonious listing of SFWA or RWA story length guidelines. But I’ve realized that, while some readers may not know their genre that well, they also don’t care. They are there for the damn story.
So of course, over the day, I realized this reader is absolutely right. That book is too short. It was based on a short story and extended to a skimpy 16K very quickly. I’m well aware there’s more story here, so I’m writing it. I had only the excuse of rushed time and unfamiliarity with a new setting and characters, and that’s not enough of an excuse. After all, I’ve read precise and breathtaking novellas that explored everything they needed to about a story, in 15K to 30K.
Only my fear of a new story set me back. I’ll stop with that, and get on with writing absurdly deep and big whenever I can. Thank you for bringing me gently back to what’s important: the story.
Hope I don’t distract you too terribly from the throes of writing this next piece! Sounds like you found your stride and are movin’ on. A discussion about story length is a useful one to the extent that we not forget what you’ve reminded us–the story needs be as long as the story needs be. And not a paragraph more.
I have not found such an easy concept simple to grasp though. I’ve read many of the sources you cite and, not surprisingly, conflicting information abounds. Sure, Pyr will be glad to have a submission but requires 85K minimum for SF and 95K minimum for fantasy. Other voices online are very clear in their assertion that an unpublished author has no business tendering a work longer than 80K regardless of age or genre group. And what is a “word” anyway? Yes I’ve read the six-characters-a-word-sixty-characters-per-line-25-lines-per-page maxim yielding 250 “words” per page. But does anyone but a typesetter still use that arithmetic? Some will insist one use the word count from one’s word processor and round up to the next thousand.
With my own completed manuscript I range anywhere from 72K to 87K depending on which metric one applies. I think it’s the right length, though. It tells the story that I wanted to tell and I believe has a satisfying and clearly delineated beginning, middle and end. Friends who saw the original outline for my series all but begged me not to write it all in one book, fearing it would be the size of “War & Peace” if I did. So I created what I thought logical stopping points, breaking the story up into three books. The first one is done and I’m seven chapters into the next one–it and the third one will also be only as long as they need to be.
Will be looking forward to reading the announcement here when it’s done…would love to read it!
MJE
Good points, Mark. I think you may be stressing too much about mms length, and here’s why: at either end of the Bell Curve, it doesn’t matter. Really bad writing stands out no matter how many words it uses, whether it’s the life’s work of a literary-fic Florence Foster Jenkins or the equally disjointed 5K ‘novel’ of a teenage creepypasta writer. Really good writing transcends length, or at least convinces the marketing teams and book designers to make the project work anyway.
I heard this story, and I don’t know whether it is apocryphal or true: back in the late eighties, doorstopper fantasy novels from the likes of Robert Jordan and Terry Goodkind forced mass market paperback publishers to invent new ways of book production. Trust me,Nature and the Almighty Dollar will find a way.
For most of us current spec-fic or romance genre writers, being in the 80K to 95K sweet spot per book seems perfectly normal, so I doubt you’ll have any worries there. The only problem? That’s where the middle swell of the Bell Curve lives. Along with books that are just good enough. The midlisters. It’s getting very hard to make those stand out long enough to gain the solid readership they could gain with a little time.
Having seen a lot of erotic romance writers become prolific powerhouses just to feed easily bored markets, I can say that it’s a dangerous game. Once readers are used to a book a month from you, they’ll leave you if you take three. So you might cut corners on writing…or even start a nice little plagiarism empire, as we’ve seen several times recently. You’ll fall back on the same cookie-cutter tropes, because you know your readers are good for it. You’ll risk burnout, a dangerous thing for an author, an even worse one for a publisher.
I suspect the best solution is focus on writing quality as much as possible, and then tweak to fit any necessary guidelines. That betters your chances in the market, even if it may not seem so from the outside.
Mark, you are a cool guy, but I’m going out on a limb and absolving you of any responsibility or duty to read my writing. Trust me on this, too.