See Janet write. Write Janet write.

[threemonkeys]

This is a little coda to the last post about novellas. As darthsappho put it, "a commercially awkward format" to publish as a stand-alone book. The production cost for a novella is almost the same as a full size novel so the retail price is almost the same as a novel. Yet the market is smaller. For one thing, a great many potential buyers will look at the word count and do a value for money calculation. It never works out well for the novella. Now I suspect that most of you are of the "its the quality not the quantity" school of thought, but I don't think that view prevails generally. As a result, big publishers tend to steer away from publishing stand-alone book form novellas.

I say all this in the light of the fact that after reading the big Dozois collection, I read a stand-alone novella published by a major publisher. It was Plum Lucky by Janet Evanovich. But that value for money calculation is still in the heads of the publisher. Now I estimate the work to be about 30000 words max, but with large print and big margins it has been inflated to the size of a volume with twice that word count or even more. But even with that and the huge popularity that Evanovich's Stephanie Plum stories enjoy, I bet this book didn't sell anywhere near as well as one of the "numbers" volumes. It is a fun book though. What is more, it was clearly never intended as a "numbers" book. It has a different more fantasy like feel than the main sequence. I can't help but wonder what length this particular story was intended to be.

Comments

[darthsappho.livejournal.com]

A good novella is certainly preferable to a bad novel, but all else being equal, there's no reason to assume a novella _would_ be higher quality. Most people would agree quantity isn't as important as quality, but it's much easier to calculate.

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

Indeed. Of course all things aren't equal when the author is already very popular but that isn't much use to a small press.