Episode 142 - A New Era for Novellas with Alan Baxter
July 12, 2022
Alan Baxter discusses A NEW ERA FOR NOVELLAS. He talks about how the novella is a fantastic length for genre fiction; publishing novellas individually or as a collection; how ebooks facilitate shorter novellas and series; how short is too short; advances from traditional publishers; and publishing a novella.
Do any of those topics pique your interest? Check out my playlist 2 MINUTES OF INDY, where over the week following the airing of the episode, I post brief video clips from the interview on each of those topics! You can also catch up on some highlights of previous episodes there. |
Alan Baxter is a British-Australian multi-award-winning author of horror, supernatural thrillers, and dark fantasy, with more than twenty books including novels, novellas, and short story collections. He’s also a whisky-soaked swear monkey and dog lover. He creates dark, weird stories among dairy paddocks on the beautiful south coast of New South Wales, Australia, where he lives with his wife, son, hound, and other creatures.
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"The original plan was to publish them individually and then collect them later, because if nothing else, you get paid twice. You get paid when you sell the story and then you get paid again later when people buy a collection. But in the writing of it, when I realized how interconnected the stories were and how each book makes a bigger story arc, I decided to just stick with it and make it all brand new, and just experiment with it that way." —Alan Baxter
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Links
Alan's Links:
www.alanbaxter.com.au
Find me Twitter - @AlanBaxter
My Amazon Author Page
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
www.alanbaxter.com.au
Find me Twitter - @AlanBaxter
My Amazon Author Page
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
Transcript
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Alan Baxter. Hey, Alan, how are you doing?
[00:00:05] Alan: I'm good. How are you?
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Alan Baxter is a British-Australian multi-award-winning author of horror, supernatural thrillers, and dark fantasy, with more than 20 books, including novellas and short story collections. He's also a whiskey-soaked swear monkey and a dog lover. He creates dark weird stories among dairy paddocks of the beautiful south coast of New South Wales, Australia, where he lives with his wife, son, hound, and other creatures.
And Alan was a guest on episode 118, which was The Martial Art of Writing. And at the end of that episode, or after we got done talking for that episode, I was asking Alan if he had any ideas for other topics that he thought would be good Indy Author Podcast listeners, and he suggested novellas.
So today we are going to be talking about novellas, which is something that I have not really explored, so I'm very curious to hear what this conversation is going to be about.
Defining Novella
[00:00:56] Matty: And so Alan, I thought we would start out by asking, how are you defining novella?
[00:01:03] Alan: Yeah, yeah, let's get the definitions down first. The manuscript side is determined by awards a lot of the time, because they have to have categories. So things like Science Fiction Writers of America, the Horror Writers Association and the Aurealis Awards here in Australia, they determine word length of different things for submissions.
So generally speaking, most of those organizations agree that a short story is anything up to 7,500 words. A novelette is anything up to 17,500 words. And then a novella is anything from 17,500 to 40,000 words. And above 40,000, it's considered a novel. For a lot of people, that distinction is a bit different. A lot of people would call something 50,000 words novella, somebody would call something 35,000 words, a novel. I've got a novella called The Roo, which is a crazy Gonzo creature feature, and people frequently refer to it as a novel, which is fine by me, but it's not quite 30,000 words. So in terms of those definitions, that's very much a novella.
So you can argue that point back and forth, but what you basically come down to is, a novella is a short novel. So it's much longer than a short story, but not as long as what might be considered a full-length novel. So really anything from 15,000, 20,000 up to 50,000 words could easily be classed as a novella. It's a short novel, in the same way that some of the classics, Animal Farm is technically a novella, The Old Man and the Sea is technically a novella. Some of these classic novels, when you go back, they're actually quite short, and would these days be classed as a novella.
Is Word Count the Only Factor?
[00:02:38] Matty: Do you think that that situation where something that you would call a novella, that a certain reader might call a novel, is that just particular to that reader? Or do you think that there are characteristics that separate a novel from a novella beyond word count for certain people?
I think something we need to remind ourselves a lot when we are writers, is that as writers, we become really aware of things like word counts and stuff like that, because it's relevant for certain submissions. You know, you might be looking at a publisher and they say, nothing under 40,000 words or whatever. You need to be aware of this stuff.
The vast majority of people that enjoy fiction are not writers, but are readers, and readers I don't think make those distinctions, which is why most people refer to The Roo, for example, as a novel, because it reads like a novel. There are multiple characters, I squeeze a lot into 30,000 words in that book. And it follows the general sort of shape, structure, et cetera, of a novel. A lot of the time, short stories are a lot more tightly focused, fewer characters and a smaller focus of sort of plot or events. Not always, you can have some pretty epic short stories, but generally speaking.
[00:03:50] Alan: And so I think that reader perception that shapes what they consider to be a novel is a longer, bigger story, maybe with more characters, maybe more time involved, and enough that you turn a lot of pages for more than a while. Rather than a short story, 15, 20 minutes, half an hour, and you're done.
So I think from a reader perspective, anything that has that little bit more bulk to it, is basically just a novel, whether they consider it a short novel or whatever, is up for debate.
[00:04:16] Matty: It would be interesting to give readers a bunch of different stories, including things like Animal Farm and Old Man and the Sea, and then when they were done, ask them to put them in order of length that they think it was. And it would be interesting to see how the actual word count equated to their assessment of that.
[00:04:33] Alan: Absolutely, and especially with eBooks, as people who are reading on eReaders and stuff, because if you're holding a book, you can see it's a thick book or it's a thin book. But a lot of the time, especially reading e-readers or listening to audio, you don't necessarily pay that much attention to how much is involved. And it tends to be the sort of vibe of the story. So you can get some big fat fantasy novels that just go at such a clip that they don't feel like they're anything like 500 pages. Or you can have something that's maybe 120 pages that's written with such sort of gentle, lyrical language that it feels like you're immersed in it for ages. And really, a lot of that kind of thing comes down to the writing style and the story and the pace that's built into it. Yeah, it would be an interesting experiment to be honest, to find a few things and just say, okay, put these in order, which was the longest or the shortest of these five things that you read, and see what people say. It would be a difficult experiment to make without people just being able to check, but it would be interesting.
[00:05:27] Matty: Yeah. You have to show it on an e-reader that doesn't have the percentage read on it, so they can't judge by that.
The Novella Is a Fantastic Length for Genre Fiction
[00:05:34] Matty: So talk a little bit about how novellas factor into your own work, both how they factor into your writing craft, and also how they factor into your publishing voyage.
[00:05:43] Alan: You know, it's an interesting thing. Because I write mostly horror, the novella is a fantastic length for genre fiction in general. We talk about a lot of the classics. If you look at a lot of the classic noir novels, they would probably be classed as novellas these days. A lot of those are inside 50,000 words.
But particularly with horror and other genre fiction, it's a really good length. But I never really set out to explore writing in that length.
I started off writing full-length novels, and then I got that advice, like so many people do, that oh, you should write some short stories because short stories are a great way to get your name out there and get people aware of you, and then they might check out your novels. And I went, yeah okay, no worries, easy! And then discovered that short stories is not easy, and it's a whole different art form, requires a whole different kind of set of skills. The principles are the same, beginning, middle, end, character development, conflict, et cetera. The art of writing short is very different to the art of writing long.
But I'd always love short stories. And when I realized what a challenge it was, it became a challenge to me personally, and I wanted to get good at it. So I really studied on writing short stories, and I ended up getting quite good at it. And I've written a lot now. And a lot of the time, then those stories would start to lengthen out, and it would get to the point where sometimes I'd think I'm writing a short story and it would actually go, actually, this has got to be a novel, and then naturally, that kind of started falling somewhere in the middle.
And I wrote a novella, this is science fiction noir novella that I serialized on my website across almost a year, and then released as a single volume. And that was quite popular. And subsequent to that, I've ended up writing in that length because it's a good way of combining those two skills where you have that immediacy of the short story, but you have a little bit more space for characters and character development like you do in the novel.
[00:07:34] Alan: And when you land it in that middle sort of ground and you land it just right, it can make for really powerful storytelling. And so things like "The Book Club" and "The Roo" that I've written since, they tend to work really well at that length. And it also translates to some degree, if you adapt something for a film, a screen play's about 100 pages. So if you adapt a novel to a film, you end up cutting out a lot of the novel. If you adapt a novella to a film, you can pretty much match one for one, because the sort of size and content is similar. Which is not why I did that, but I'm so influenced by film and graphic novel and stuff like that, I think I naturally fall to that kind of storytelling pace.
And then I got to the point where I ended up writing books like "The Gulp" and "The Fall," which are novella collection, so "The Gulp" and "The Fall," each have five novellas. So that's 10 novellas across two books that each one is an individual story, and across all 10 tells a bigger story. So I've ended up just getting to that sort of point where I end up playing with all sorts of different lengths of things, but I frequently come back to that kind of mid-length of storytelling. Sometimes I end up putting them together in a whole book, sometimes end up releasing them on their own as their own short book.
Yeah, it's an interesting process, and I'm getting back now. At the moment, I'm getting back to full-length novels. I've got a full-length novel coming out in August. Another one's finished and I'm working on another one now. At some point probably before long, I'll get back to that shorter range.
The Creation Process of a Collection of Novellas
I was wondering if, as an example, you could walk us through the evolution or the creation process of one of your collections of novellas. Did you publish each of those novellas separately and then collect them? Were they written with the intention of presenting them together as a collection? How did that come about?
[00:09:17] Alan: That's an unusual sequence of events actually. So if we go back to the end of hang on, what year is it? If we go back to the end of 2019, which is when I wrote "The Roo," as I said, which is just a Gonzo creature feature, it's just a bit of nonsense fun. And it was written almost as a bit of a joke. But it's 30,000 words and it's like this shlock. It was deliberately done as a short book version of a B-grade horror movie, like Kujo or Jaws or whatever, but it's a kangaroo. And I decided, just release that independently, there's no point in trying to look around for a publisher for something like that. And it was a bit of a gag, and it was a bit of fun. But then it went ballistic. It became really popular, went really well, which I was very pleased about.
Then fast forward to the beginning of 2020, and all of a sudden, I'm trying to pivot my day job to Zoom. I've got my kid at home for homeschool, and everything just got disrupted. And I couldn't really concentrate on the bigger novel project that I was working on. So I just put it aside for a while.
And when I started getting back to work, I was like, I should probably just work on some shorter things so that I can just fit them in between all these other changes until we figure out what's going on.
And for a long time, I'd have this idea of writing a series of interconnected stories set in the same place, which is this place called Gulpepper, which is this isolated harbor town on the coast of Australia. People call it "The Gulp," because the place has a habit of swallowing people. And this was something I had as an idea for a long time.
[00:10:39] Alan: And I didn't think I was like, interconnected stories about weird Australian horror, is there really a market for that? I don't know. Should I do that or not?
And after the success of "The Roo," and everybody saying how much they loved how Australian it was, I thought, okay, maybe I should do that. And the original plan was to write a whole bunch of stories set in the same place and sell them ideally to magazines, anthologies or whatever, and just start building this mythology of this place, and then at some point collect them.
But because of the pandemic and everything else that was going on, I started writing these stories and I realized I had this bigger idea where across the first five stories, there's an arc that comes together, and I thought, I might just keep myself busy. I'm going to write all five stories. I'm going to put them together in a single volume. I'm not going to try to publish them first. I'm just going to put out this and just see what happens, because I hadn't done that before. Also knowing that if it did go okay, the next book would be another five stories where I could expand that into one bigger overarching story.
So it gave me the opportunity to write all these different types of horror. Because you know, there's cosmic horror, body horror, crime horror, both books contain a variety of different styles, but all connected by place and character, because they're all set in Gulpepper or around Gulpepper.
It was an experiment off the back of the sort of craziness that was "The Roo." It was an experiment to see if people would be into something that was a bit more serious horror in terms of still very Australian. And because then subsequently, "The Gulp" did do really well, I got to go ahead and write "The Fall" and I put that out as the same way, just as a volume of original stories.
And so I've ended up publishing 10 novellas in two books that never went anywhere else for publishing first. I just put them out as these two volumes. Because of course, if I'd have tried to sell them separately, it's entirely possible I might have sold those stories in different places, I would've made some money from those sales and potentially gained some audience, but then they would be under contract to those places for 6 months or 12 months or whatever. So the collection would then be pushed back.
But in the plague years that we've had, I've enjoyed having the opportunity to just put these books together and put them out while all this other stuff's going on. And now the two volumes are out, and they seem to be doing quite well. So it seems that it was actually, as it turns out, it seems like it was quite a good decision, and I've now established this place that I can revisit in future stories and novels and I've got this whole little, so one of the reviewers called it, "My Castle Rock," king has Castle Rock as his location, which was a great compliment because it's yeah, that's what I'm aiming to do. I want this sandbox that I can repeatedly come back and play in that has this mythology and this history, a variety of different things I can do there.
Does the Novella Format Allow Returning to It?
[00:13:21] Matty: So do you think the fact that they were novellas and not novels makes it easier to sustain that Castle Rock-like approach, because you're leaving more available to continue to go back to, whereas with a novel you might be plumbing one character or a set of characters' experiences so much that it wouldn't really enable you to return to it?
[00:13:44] Alan: Possibly. Yeah, possibly. It's an interesting thought because as well with these books, as novellas, they're all on the shorter end of novellas because none of them are longer than 25,000 words. Most of them are around the 20,000-word mark, which means that you get to really dig deep and tell quite a big story, but the focus is on a fairly tight cast of characters. But because there are 10 stories, we end up with quite a broadcast of characters that occasionally pop up in different stories, and each have their sort of time in the limelight.
And I think it definitely does give me that ability to go back and go, which of these might I draw up more from of those that might, you know, not everyone survives, that's the nature of horror, but of the ones that do, which ones will I draw more from?
[00:14:24] Alan: And it's been really interesting, the feedback and which characters and which stories really resonate with people. And it's quite an interesting sort of barometer in that respect to go, okay, I reckon people will respond if I write more about this character or this group or this event. Whereas other stories that I really enjoyed writing at the time don't have such positive feedback. It's oh, okay, I guess that was enough for those characters.
So yeah, it does give me that opportunity. And apart from anything else, even without revisiting characters, just the place and the surrounds just gives me this environment to set stories that I now know really well. So anything I write there will have that sort of authentic sense of place.
People coming to it new can enjoy that story. People coming to it off the back of "The Gulp" and "The Fall" and everything like that will be like, oh, that's that place, and that's that pub, and it builds that sort of, it’s almost Easter eggs in a way, for readers, because they get all these, ah, that's that pub that was in that story, and that was that. And somebody else would never know that and it doesn't matter, but the people that do know that it's a bit of a treat. So I'm a real nerd for that stuff myself, I love coming across something, that's that character that was in so and so.
[00:15:30] Matty: Yeah, I like that also. Yeah, so I just really get to play with that.
And I'm just about finished on a novel now that's set up in the hills behind Gulpepper, so basically there's hardly any mention of any of it, other than a couple of little passing references to places where they go. And it's just enough for people that have read "The Gulp" or "The Fall" to go, oh, this is the same place. People that haven't, doesn't matter.
[00:15:53] Matty: Yeah.
[00:15:53] Alan: And that's a full-length novel. So yeah, it's just fun to establish something that you can then revisit like that.
Publishing Novellas Individually or as a Collection
[00:16:01] Matty: I do think that a possible benefit of publishing those individually rather than as a collection right off the bat, would be that you would get that input from the readers about, oh, I really love this character, this setting, or this whatever, and focus on that. Did you ever consider that when you were making that decision about whether to publish them one at a time or as a group, the like market research aspect of it?
[00:16:22] Alan: I did, and the original plan was to publish them individually and then collect them later, apart from anything else. Because if nothing else, you get paid twice. You get paid when you sell the story and then you get paid again later when people buy a collection. But in the writing of it, when I realized how interconnected the stories were and how each book makes a bigger story arc, I decided to just stick with it and make it all brand new, and just experiment with it that way. Partly because of the way they ended up. Sort of self-referential like that, the way that they went together, but also largely because if I had of tried to sell them, then sold them, then had to wait out the exclusivity period and everything, the whole process would've been quite fractured, and they wouldn't necessarily have come out in the order that they are in the collection. And given that one story might reference events in another, they do need to be read in order. And so that would've potentially meant trying to sell one until it's sold, knowing when its publication date was, and then the next one. And might have been two years of selling stories before they were all out, another six months before the rights were all back, and so it could have been still two years from now before I got to put out the collection. Whereas I got to do it all at once this way. So
How is Publishing Novellas Different from Novels?
[00:17:40] Matty: Can you describe the logistics of how the publication of the novellas was the same or different than independently publishing a novel-length work?
[00:17:50] Alan: To be honest, it was not really any different. And even now there are people who are referring to both collections as novels. And to some degree, they are like mosaic novels in a way, because there is a thread that goes right through. But really, the process of putting it together of building a sort of a compelling blurb for it, putting it in a good package, making it available, pre-orders, all that sort of stuff, the process was pretty much just the same. And it feels like a lot of people don't really draw that much of a distinction.
When you have a collection of short stories that are all disconnected and they're just collected short stories by the author, that sort of has a different vibe.
[00:18:27] Alan: But I think because this is five stories of "The Gulp," I think I pretty much talked not deliberately, but I think I ended up pretty much talking about it and promoting it the same way I would promote a novel, because it is more a single volume thing. And then when the four came out this year, it was promoted in the same way as a sequel to "The Gulp," which it is, which is more. It's a continuation really, more than a sequel of "The Gulp." So yeah, I think I pretty much approached it the same way as I would at novel.
[00:18:55] Matty: And you didn't have to get five covers or five descriptions, you were packaging it as a package, right?
Yeah, that's right. And it was packaged in that sort of old-school sort of horror way, so it's got that sort of old 80s-90s horror paperback look about it, and it's got that sort of Stranger Things vibe about how it's spoken about and how it's promoted and stuff like that.
A couple of the stories would've been very short to release independently on their own. They would've potentially gone well into an anthology or magazine or something. But by putting both books, both books end up being about, I think, 85,000 words or so, of all the novellas combined. So yeah, they both end up as you say, they get packaged as a single kind of volume and promoted that way.
The other consideration at the time was, do I sell these stories to get paid for the magazines, whatever, and all that exclusivity periods and all that we talked about? The next thought was, do I release each one as a short first and then a combined volume, or do I just go straight to the combined volume? And while getting, as you say, 99 cents for each one, and then a collective volume was appealing financially, it really did come down to that, I don't really want to have to put in the time and the effort to put together five products and then a sixth product as a collection. So I went straight to the collection.
eBooks Facilitate Shorter Novellas and Series
[00:20:18] Alan: But there is definitely a market and a popularity at the moment for shorts on Kindle and chapbooks and stuff like that. And I think that's definitely down to the eBook, because the financial commitment of making a print edition of something available used to be a lot higher than it is now. Of course, you can pretty much make a print edition available fairly easily but a lot of the time, even though you can do it quite easily, the cost is relatively prohibitive for buying because you've still got your print, production, delivery costs involved.
Not in the case with an eBook. You can put a story up that's 5,000 words or 50,000 words, and you can charge 99 cents for it if you want. And I think that's definitely encouraged a lot of people to release shorts and novellas, because for a number of reasons, I think in some ways it helps people to build up their profile, it builds up a back catalog of work, gives people more places to find that author.
In some ways, the downside of it is that people are churning out series because it's so easy to do that, especially with KU or just on Kindle or just on eBook, where they're doing series of novels and each one of those novels is 30,000 or 40,000 words, which is effectively a novella. That can be problematic in a way, for people who are expecting that bigger reading experience, and 60,000, 70,000, 80,000 words plus is what they're expecting to read, and they buy a novel when it's 25,000 words or 30,000 words.
So I know that there is a certain sort of contingent, if you like, that are unhappy about that. But from the people I've spoken to, it seems to me that a lot of the feedback is that if they're priced relatively competitively, so they're not priced too much, often 99 cents or under $3 or $4, it seems that people don't really care too much about the length. If it's 25,000 words or 60,000 words, they don't mind, they just enjoy the reading. If they spend 99 cents or $1.99 on it, then they consider that good value and they're happy to have that reading experience.
[00:22:15] Alan: And then those authors get to put out a number of stories in a series or something without having to commit to a full sort of 60,000 words plus novel each and every time.
So it's interesting how that perception is changing in reader expectations. And I think it's entirely down to the fact that eBooks are so easy to process, to buy, to consume without spending a lot of money, either in the production of them, for the author or in the purchase of them for the reader. That it means that a lot of people are enjoying shorter stories and more often. And as you said yourself, you put out shorts for 99 cents. A lot of people are putting out novel series where no novel in the series is more than 30,000 words, so effectively they're a novella series.
Like my Eli Carver books, there's three of those now. They're all about 30,000, 40,000 words. And basically the publisher, readers, everybody else, they just treat them as a novel series. The Eli Carver novels is what frequently gets referred to. That's fine, that's good for me because they're the perfect length for what they are, because they're this horror crime noir sort of thing. So they work really well at that word length of about 120 pages. Readers are happy with the reading experience that they get. Publisher is happy to keep putting them out. And when I write those stories, I can focus in and make a good, tight, powerful, fast-paced story, which is what you want when you've got that sort of thriller-crime crossover. And reader expectations now are that that's what those books are. They're these short fast-paced novels space novels. Great.
How Short is Too Short?
[00:23:43] Matty: Yeah. I worried maybe more than I should have about readers thinking they were getting a novel length work when they bought my shorts. And so if you go on Amazon or any of the retail sites that support presentation of series, I have the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels, and then I have the Ann Kinnear Suspense Shorts. There are two separate series. The subtitle is, An Ann Kinnear Suspense Short, and the description says, a short story. So I'm trying to put it everywhere, so people aren't surprised. And I do think there's a difference. If somebody was expecting a novel and got 4,000 words, that's different than someone was expecting a novel and got 30,000 words. Like the first one, they're just going to be pissed off. The second one, they could very well be completely happy with that experience.
Yeah, I think that's really key. I think it's really key to be very clear that that's what you're doing. If you have something in a world, a so and so short story, really clear, right up front.
[00:24:32] Matty: Yep.
[00:24:32] Alan: In the description, a short story about, and so people, if they do have a complaint, it's like, well look, sorry, it was right there. Whereas I think as soon as you beat sort of 20,000-30,000 words, you can just put it out as a so and so book. And if it was a 30,000-word book and you were trying to sell it at $8.99, you might have people that would pay that kind of money expecting a full-length novel, and then would be a bit upset about it.
But most of us don't price our work at the top end of those sort of like legacy publisher, eBook prices. Most of independent publishers and small press publishers and people, we tend to price our work in the mid-lower range of pricing anyway. And as you say, I think somebody who expects a novel and gets 30,000 words is just going to be like, oh, that was a short novel, that was cool, and not actually feel offended by it.
But if it is 15,000 words or less, definitely in that short story territory, you really do need to very clearly say, this is a short story. And if it's 99 cents, then let them complain, frankly. They paid less than a dollar for it, you know?
Legacy vs Indy Publishing Clash
The one episode where my guess JK Ellem talked about this very explicitly, was episode 97, "Taking the Long View for Publishing Success." And one of the topics we talked about was that he had done this very careful analysis of profitability against book length. And book length, being a measure of how long it took him to write it. And I think that he said that the sweet spot for him was 60,000 words. That after 60,000 words, he wasn't saying anything more that the readers were clamoring for, and that his earlier books, which were longer, once he scaled back, that it improved the pace. He had other craft-related things in addition to the business-related things. But I had never thought about doing that actual, like the finances of the cost of putting words on the page.
[00:26:20] Alan: This is where legacy publishing and independent publishing clash, because generally speaking, traditional publishing, if you're trying to get a publisher to pick up a novel, you're almost certainly going to see 80,000 to 120,000 words. That's usually the bracket. If you're writing fantasy science fiction, sometimes they'll go a little bit higher, but even then, for a debut, they don't want it to be too big.
Equally, they don't want it to be less. And part of that reason comes back to the old-fashioned bookstore issues, where it's all about shelf real estate. And a spine that's less than 80,000 words is so narrow, it doesn't get noticed. So you need the spine to be wide enough to get noticed.
And that's why big fat fantasy ended up being 250,000 words per volume. Once someone was established, if they wrote a trilogy that took up half a shelf, it pushed out other people. There wasn't room for other books to be there, and those books were really going to get noticed. So it really did, there was a very much an actual physical presence issue with word length.
And legacy publishing is still very much in that mindset. And it's very difficult to sell a book to any of the big publishers that's under 80,000 words. 70,000 words, you might get away with, but that 80,000 to 120,000 words is still considered the sort of sweet spot in terms of book length, and a lot of that has to do with spine width.
Independent publishers who mostly sell eBooks, and if they do sell print editions, they print on demand. It doesn't really matter, they're not going on shelves, it doesn't matter what they look like side on.
Write the Length Your Story Needs to Be
[00:27:46] Alan: A lot of the time, a lot of indies are saying that there's no point in writing above 60,000 words. And a lot of readers seem to not expect that. A lot of readers I think, when they read independent novels, they quite often expect those to be shorter, or they're not surprised when they are shorter. But equally, I think it's really important that whatever it is that you are writing, you write the story the length it needs to be. Often just, because I write sort of horror crime mixed with some fantasy stuff like that, for me, that sweet spot tends to be up to about 100,000 words, but usually somewhere more like 80,000. So I'm on the sort of lower end of that traditional bracket, which is useful, because I still fit in that bracket potentially, if I want to sell somewhere else. But then I have ended up writing a lot of novellas. The Eli Carver novels are all between 30,000 and 40,000 words. "The Roo" is 30,000 words. "The Book Club's" 30,000 words. Every story in "The Gulp" and "The Fall" are all around 20,000-25,000 words. And it's great that we're in an environment now where they can be written and sell to readers alongside anything else without particular distinctions being made on whether it's a novel or not, you know?
How Readers Assess Value
[00:28:55] Matty: It is interesting to think about how readers assess value. And I can look back, especially if I was like in an airport and I was buying a book to read on the airplane. I'm going back a number of years, but part of my assessment was going to be how thick the spine was, because if I was going to spend whatever I was spending for the paperback book, I thought, if it's this thick, it's going to give me more time and more entertainment than if it's this thick.
And it's I think how people assess audiobooks now, if they're on an audiobook subscription, that you're not going to spend your subscription credit on a two-hour book, you're going to look for like, the 20-hour book because you're getting more for your money. And it's interesting how the way people are paying and consuming that work influences their assessment of what good value for money is.
[00:29:37] Alan: Yeah, I think it's true. Like with print, you definitely feel like if I'm going to spend $30, like in Australia, you go to an airport, you probably spend $30 on a new paperback, $30 Australian. And if you spend that on a 400-page book or you spend that on 120-page book, it's a definite perception of value.
With audio you're absolutely right, I've heard from a number of different sources, it is really difficult to sell short audiobooks because often people don't buy lots of audio. They buy one a month, they get their credit, they go and grab something off the wish list. And if they've got a bunch of stuff that's 12, 14, 16 hours, and a couple of things on there that are 6 or 7 hours even, they always tend to default to the one that's going to give them more listening experience.
[00:30:15] Alan: That doesn't seem to translate the same way with eBooks, probably partly because the pricing is in a much narrower band anyway, because you're normally looking at anything between $1 to $10. So if it's 2 hours of reading or 10 hours of reading, that difference in price maybe doesn't seem quite so distinct. But I think that's a lot of why novellas are really popular in eBook, but you'd have trouble selling novellas as audio.
Equally, if we take the Eli Carver as an example, each of those is about, like I said, 35,000 words. So selling them as novellas is not a problem in terms of eBook or in terms of print for that matter too much, although they obviously sell a lot better in eBook. They're not on audio, but I think if they were going onto audio, there's three now that have a fairly strong arc across. And that's probably what I would do, is package those together, so it would be like a boxset in audio, which would come out to about 100,000 words.
[00:31:09] Matty: Yeah.
[00:31:09] Alan: So that would be like a, I don't know, like 10–12-hour audio. And if you do that for one credit, you're more likely to have people pick that up because they're going to feel like they're getting that value for money. Yeah, part one, part two, part three. But yeah, it is a really interesting perception of value and what people are getting for their money. And eBooks are the only one that doesn't seem to have that. But that really does come down to pricing in that narrow band, I think.
Traditional Publishers Paying for Novellas
[00:32:05] Matty: Well, we've talked a lot about some independent publishing options, but you had mentioned that there are traditional publishers who are paying good advances for novellas. So do you want to talk about that a little bit?
[00:32:18] Alan: Yeah, yeah. It's interesting, the sort of legacy publishers if you like, like the Big Four, Big Five, whatever it is these days. They're still very much in that old-fashioned mindset of novels and all that sort of thing. But a lot of the small press, and a lot of the sort of specialist imprints of the bigger press are starting to catch on that actually novellas are really popular.
Probably the biggest of them is Tor. And Tor have a novella line where they pay a pretty significant advance, and they produce really good novellas.
Advance Payments with Traditional Publishers
[00:32:48] Alan: A number of mid-sized small press or independent press are frequently opening for novels and novellas so anything up to x words. And they're getting in on that, what we've talked about, the fact that you can sell those in eBooks as the majority line, but you make it available in print on demand, doesn't have associated upfront costs. And if people are prepared to pay what it costs to buy that print edition, they will.
But a lot of those publishers like Tor, pay a good advance. Some other publishers would, but also a lot of the independent or small press these days, we definitely seem to be getting to that stage where a lot of publishers are not paying advances, especially on novellas or shorter stuff, but they are packaging a really good book. They're putting the sort of power of their reach and their social media behind things, which is great for getting readers.
But because that's the case and they're not paying advances on this stuff, I think it's really important to try to negotiate a better royalty rate when you do these things. It's like, well, if you're not going to pay an advance, I want a higher royalty, especially on eBooks. And you can negotiate a rising royalty. Okay, so after X number of copies sold, the royalty goes up to this amount. So those are things that you can try to negotiate with these publishers.
I do wish everybody would still pay an advance if it's traditional publishing, even if it's a small advance, few hundred dollars, it's just that little kick of confidence. They're going to have to recoup their production costs and at least that much, so they're going to push it at least that much. Which is the whole point of an advance, really, it's the publisher going, we believe in this, here's some money in advance. We're going to make at least this much back; this is the plan. Obviously, lots of things don't earn out, and the bigger the advance, the more likely it is to not earn out.
[00:34:27] Alan: It would be good if even the small publishers did still. Offer even small advances for everything they put out, but just the economics of it is difficult these days. But if they don't offer an advance, you still get potentially the benefit of them putting together and packaging a good-looking book, and you have the weight of that publisher and that publisher reputation behind your work, which can help you to gain readers.
And at the end of the day, that's what you want. You want to increase your overall pool of readers. So that's what you've got to figure out, I guess. Is it worth going that route in order to expand your readership?
Publishing a Novella
[00:34:59] Matty: If there's a new author who's looking to submit, do you think the traditional publishers would be primarily interested in novellas from authors that they're already working with on novels, or could someone right off the bat, submit a novella and have a reasonable chance of being considered?
[00:35:18] Alan: Yeah, they could, especially more and more so now, I do quite a lot of work with Grey Matter Press, and they have a whole Emergent Expressions line now, which is basically where they're looking for new authors with novellas and sort of short novels, to pick up and find new voices. And that's what they're looking for and how they're marketing it. A lot of the time, publishers take a chance on someone with a novella to see how it sells as well. If they're running a novella line, you definitely don't need any sort of history of novels or anything to get in on that level. What they want is a quality novella, so yeah, absolutely.
And it can be a really great place for people to start because you can build a backlist of short fiction, magazines, anthologies or whatever, which subsequently gets your name out there, but can be a bit hard to track down. Whereas if you've had a novella published, that's a book that's available somewhere. You can direct people straight to that book, that's by me. So yeah, if people are open for novellas, you definitely don't need to think that you need any kind of history at all. If you've got a good novella, you've got a much a chance at anyone else.
[00:36:15] Matty: Where would you recommend that people go to find what publishers may be looking for novella-length works?
[00:36:21] Alan: It's really a case of looking into who's publishing novellas and checking guidelines.
That's what it always comes down to in the end. And trying to figure out which publishers are publishing the sort of novellas that are in line with the sort of stuff that you're writing. When it comes to genre fiction, science fiction, fantasy, horror in particular, Tor from that novella point of view, Tor is still the benchmark. As far as I know, they've got the biggest advance, they've got a big distribution network. So definitely a great place to get in on, but equal, it's incredibly hard to get anything through there because they pick and choose, and they've got a very specific sort of idea of what they want.
You come down a tier and a lot of the other independent presses, like Grey Matter Press or Crystal Lake Publishing or places like this, they're frequently opening for novellas and looking for things. And it's really just a case of having a look around, seeing who's publishing novellas, if they match the sort of genre style of what it is that you are doing and check guidelines, see when they're open and take your shot. That's yeah, really what it comes down to. And deciding for yourself, do you want to go that route? Because as we know, if you do it independently, there's all that work involved with cover, editing, everything else. All that gets taken away if you go with a publisher. They do all that for you. That's the primary reason to go with a publisher. But, and obviously then the reach that they have and the potentially expanded audience.
[00:37:38] Alan: But is that worth the cut of royalties that they're going to take? That's where you're always going to balance up. But especially if you're relatively new to the game, you haven't got a readership, it's entirely likely that you're not going to get much in the way of royalties because it's very difficult to get noticed. And if that publisher can give you a little bit of a boost in making people aware of you, then it's worth sharing your royalties with them.
Publishers Increasingly Targeting Novella Lines
[00:38:01] Matty: It would also be interesting to see the difference in profitability of authors who are positioning or publishers who are positioning these shorter 30,000-40,000 word works as explicitly as novellas versus novels. I had mentioned about the conversation with JK Ellem that he was writing what I think many people in the publishing world would consider a shorter novel, but it was meeting the needs of his readers and so he was producing novels more quickly, not producing novellas. It's just an interesting mindset when you're trying to make the maximum profit from your creative work.
[00:38:40] Alan: Yeah, I think a lot of people, a lot of publishers are specifically sort of targeting if you like, novella line. I think there is a sort of rise in awareness, and to some degree, a rise in popularity of the novella. People are, ah, this is a great novella, these people put out great novellas. And so I think some publishers are embracing that, and this is our novella line. They're priced accordingly compared to the novel line, great introduction to people's work. If you don't know the author, you can spend a couple of bucks on 30,000 words, which is much less time and money commitment than a full-length novel potentially, and go, oh, actually I really like this person's work.
And so a lot of publishers are deliberately trying to target new business, if you like, with a novella line. How successful that is, I don't know for sure. From my own perspective, I've been in the game a while and for a long time, I've been writing short stories and full-length novels and novellas, and my kind of readership blurs together. And I've noticed that in terms of my readers, it doesn't seem to make much distinction. They will talk about like a full-length novel, like "Devouring Dark," they will talk about the same way as a novella like "Manifest Recall." They'll just refer to them both as you know, "Alan Baxter books," which is fine with me, that's great.
[00:39:51] Matty: Yeah.
[00:39:51] Alan: When it comes to picking up new readers, I'm not sure how well, I'm not sure how much a novella versus a novel versus whatever sort of appeals. And it's something I've thought about, I should maybe try to promote things for what they are, to see if it does draw people in. If I'm talking about "Manifest Recall," I should try to promote it as a novella, check out this action-packed, short novel. I've got a new novel out in August called "Sallow Bend," and I am making a point of saying, this is my first full-length novel since 2018's "Devouring Dark." I haven't released a full-length novel in four years, which wasn't deliberate in any way, partly down to publishing, partly down to pandemic, partly down to the fact that I ended up concentrating on "The Gulp" and "The Fall" for a couple of years, because so much was going on. But I am making a point of promoting "Sallow Bend" as a full-length novel. Which it is, it's coming out through Cemetery Dance and it's close to 100,000 words. And it's a full-length folk horror novel, and I'm using that fact that it's my first full-length novel in four years to some degree as a promotional tool going, if you've been waiting for a bigger story from me, here it is.
Equally, "The Gulp" and "The Fall," they're each the length of a full-length novel. They're just divided into stories, so it's a bit more sort of mosaic. All three Eli Carver books together are the equivalent of a full-length novel, but they're three separate stories. So I think I need to try to make sure I talk about things a bit more like that, so that you get that appeal across. These are shorter, they go together. These are longer, this is a full-length novel or whatever.
But for the moment, I am actively using the fact that "Sallow Bend" is the first full-length novel in four years as a point of interest to see if that catches people's eye. And it seems to, I've had a few people talk about, oh, I can't wait for this, this is exciting, it's great to get back into something longer by you.
It's like, okay, cool. So I don't know if that will subsequently attract more readers as well. If they want to find out something from me, here's a full-length standalone novel, you can check it out. We'll see, I don't know.
Test the Naming in A/B Tests for Ads
For authors who aren't explicitly taking advantage of that fact that, as you're saying, the first full-length novel in a while, it would be interesting to run ads that would be, ones that took that 30,000-40,000-word work, called it a novel in some, called it a novella in others. Run that as an A/B test and then the other axis of the A/B test would be ads to people who are in your follower base, ads to people who are not in your follower base and see how that turned out.
[00:42:16] Alan: It would be an interesting experiment to run, wouldn't it? And yeah, see, particularly for people who are not already readers, who aren't in that follower base, it would be very interesting to see what sort of percentage return you got on something specifically tagged as a novella over a novel. That would be quite interesting to do.
A lot of the time, like when the third Eli Carver book came out last year, and a lot of the time, I was promoting that as a new short novel with Eli Carver. When Eli Carver story continues in the new short novel "Ghost Recall." Because I was, for a little while there, I was experimenting with how people responded to the term, short novel, as opposed to novella. And to be honest, I never really gathered enough data to know how much of an impact that made.
But people's response to it didn't seem particularly positive or negative that I was calling it a short novel. Yeah, I found that I need to find a way I think, of experimenting a bit more clearly on that stuff, because at the time, it occurred to me, I wonder how many people know quite what a novella is. Because there's definitely a raised awareness these days. A lot of people know what a novella is, but then frequently, you still get people go, what's a novella, how's that different to a novel? And you just go, it's basically the same, it's just a short novel. And they're like, why don't you just call it short novel?
[00:43:33] Matty: Yeah. And it's a good question. Why don't you?
[00:43:35] Matty: Yeah. The term that I still think sounds funny is novelette. I don't know that I'm ever going to be able to hear the novelette not feel like I'm reading something from the 30s or something like that. It sounds very old-fashioned to me.
[00:43:45] Alan: Yeah. And I honestly, I don't know why it exists. Let me go back to those awards and those categories, I think it was introduced so that if you have a short story that's 15,000 words long, it's very hard, I don't think it actually is, but the perception was that it was very hard to compare that to something that was only 4,000 or 5,000 words long. And so it's a little bit unfair to put those things together. I don't actually think it necessarily it's because some of the most powerful short stories are like 4,000 words. Some 15,000 words short stories are very cool, but they're not necessarily, they could easily be a lot shorter.
Anyway, the awards drew that distinction, they said, okay, short story is up to 7,500 words. But then you couldn't have a novella that was 9,000 words.
Yeah. That's still a short story, that doesn't count as a short novel by any stretch of the imagination. So they created novelette, which went from 7,501 words up to 17,500. So that allowed them to have a novella was anything 17,500 to 40,000. That seems fair, like anything over 16,000-17,000 words starts to have that short book vibe about it.
But why they didn't just extend short story to 15,000 words and have novella 15,000 to 40,000? I don't understand why they created this novelette thing in the middle. And like you said, it even sounds weird. It sounds like something you'd find in a kitchen in the 50s, oh, we'll blend that up in the novelette and then we'll, so I don't quite understand why. I don't know why it exists. It annoys me. And within "The Gulp" and "The Fall," a couple of those stories technically are novelettes, because there's a couple of them that are more like 15,000 words than 20,000 but I'm like, what, I just, they're novella collections. I just can't be bothered. And if people want to call them short story collections, I'm okay with that as well, because even the longest one in there is less than 25,000. You can call them what you like, it's a mosaic novel, I don't get care, because they're single volumes.
[00:45:34] Matty: Yeah, the really brave tester of ads can run the C test. They'll have the A/B test, to see the A and B test and then the C test where we call it a novelette and see if anybody bites.
[00:45:44] Alan: Yeah. What the hell is a novelette? Is that a type of clothing? What is it? I don't know. It's just, it's such a weird word, I don't like it.
[00:45:53] Matty: Well, Alan thank you so much. This has been such an interesting conversation, and it sounds like you have all sorts of stuff coming up, so please let the listeners and viewers know where they can find out more about you and all you're doing online.
[00:46:04] Alan: No worries. Yeah, it's been a pleasure. It's an interesting subject and it's one I think is still developing and we're still all how it goes as well. It seems to be changing a lot, it's one of those things that seems to be constantly in flux. So it's interesting to watch.
But yes, my website is a central point for everything. You can track down all my social media and books and all that sort of stuff. So that's just my name, AlanBaxter.com.au will take you there. I spend way too much time on Twitter, just @AlanBaxter. So you can find me there. This was so interesting.
[00:46:35] Alan: No worries. Thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure.
[00:00:05] Alan: I'm good. How are you?
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Alan Baxter is a British-Australian multi-award-winning author of horror, supernatural thrillers, and dark fantasy, with more than 20 books, including novellas and short story collections. He's also a whiskey-soaked swear monkey and a dog lover. He creates dark weird stories among dairy paddocks of the beautiful south coast of New South Wales, Australia, where he lives with his wife, son, hound, and other creatures.
And Alan was a guest on episode 118, which was The Martial Art of Writing. And at the end of that episode, or after we got done talking for that episode, I was asking Alan if he had any ideas for other topics that he thought would be good Indy Author Podcast listeners, and he suggested novellas.
So today we are going to be talking about novellas, which is something that I have not really explored, so I'm very curious to hear what this conversation is going to be about.
Defining Novella
[00:00:56] Matty: And so Alan, I thought we would start out by asking, how are you defining novella?
[00:01:03] Alan: Yeah, yeah, let's get the definitions down first. The manuscript side is determined by awards a lot of the time, because they have to have categories. So things like Science Fiction Writers of America, the Horror Writers Association and the Aurealis Awards here in Australia, they determine word length of different things for submissions.
So generally speaking, most of those organizations agree that a short story is anything up to 7,500 words. A novelette is anything up to 17,500 words. And then a novella is anything from 17,500 to 40,000 words. And above 40,000, it's considered a novel. For a lot of people, that distinction is a bit different. A lot of people would call something 50,000 words novella, somebody would call something 35,000 words, a novel. I've got a novella called The Roo, which is a crazy Gonzo creature feature, and people frequently refer to it as a novel, which is fine by me, but it's not quite 30,000 words. So in terms of those definitions, that's very much a novella.
So you can argue that point back and forth, but what you basically come down to is, a novella is a short novel. So it's much longer than a short story, but not as long as what might be considered a full-length novel. So really anything from 15,000, 20,000 up to 50,000 words could easily be classed as a novella. It's a short novel, in the same way that some of the classics, Animal Farm is technically a novella, The Old Man and the Sea is technically a novella. Some of these classic novels, when you go back, they're actually quite short, and would these days be classed as a novella.
Is Word Count the Only Factor?
[00:02:38] Matty: Do you think that that situation where something that you would call a novella, that a certain reader might call a novel, is that just particular to that reader? Or do you think that there are characteristics that separate a novel from a novella beyond word count for certain people?
I think something we need to remind ourselves a lot when we are writers, is that as writers, we become really aware of things like word counts and stuff like that, because it's relevant for certain submissions. You know, you might be looking at a publisher and they say, nothing under 40,000 words or whatever. You need to be aware of this stuff.
The vast majority of people that enjoy fiction are not writers, but are readers, and readers I don't think make those distinctions, which is why most people refer to The Roo, for example, as a novel, because it reads like a novel. There are multiple characters, I squeeze a lot into 30,000 words in that book. And it follows the general sort of shape, structure, et cetera, of a novel. A lot of the time, short stories are a lot more tightly focused, fewer characters and a smaller focus of sort of plot or events. Not always, you can have some pretty epic short stories, but generally speaking.
[00:03:50] Alan: And so I think that reader perception that shapes what they consider to be a novel is a longer, bigger story, maybe with more characters, maybe more time involved, and enough that you turn a lot of pages for more than a while. Rather than a short story, 15, 20 minutes, half an hour, and you're done.
So I think from a reader perspective, anything that has that little bit more bulk to it, is basically just a novel, whether they consider it a short novel or whatever, is up for debate.
[00:04:16] Matty: It would be interesting to give readers a bunch of different stories, including things like Animal Farm and Old Man and the Sea, and then when they were done, ask them to put them in order of length that they think it was. And it would be interesting to see how the actual word count equated to their assessment of that.
[00:04:33] Alan: Absolutely, and especially with eBooks, as people who are reading on eReaders and stuff, because if you're holding a book, you can see it's a thick book or it's a thin book. But a lot of the time, especially reading e-readers or listening to audio, you don't necessarily pay that much attention to how much is involved. And it tends to be the sort of vibe of the story. So you can get some big fat fantasy novels that just go at such a clip that they don't feel like they're anything like 500 pages. Or you can have something that's maybe 120 pages that's written with such sort of gentle, lyrical language that it feels like you're immersed in it for ages. And really, a lot of that kind of thing comes down to the writing style and the story and the pace that's built into it. Yeah, it would be an interesting experiment to be honest, to find a few things and just say, okay, put these in order, which was the longest or the shortest of these five things that you read, and see what people say. It would be a difficult experiment to make without people just being able to check, but it would be interesting.
[00:05:27] Matty: Yeah. You have to show it on an e-reader that doesn't have the percentage read on it, so they can't judge by that.
The Novella Is a Fantastic Length for Genre Fiction
[00:05:34] Matty: So talk a little bit about how novellas factor into your own work, both how they factor into your writing craft, and also how they factor into your publishing voyage.
[00:05:43] Alan: You know, it's an interesting thing. Because I write mostly horror, the novella is a fantastic length for genre fiction in general. We talk about a lot of the classics. If you look at a lot of the classic noir novels, they would probably be classed as novellas these days. A lot of those are inside 50,000 words.
But particularly with horror and other genre fiction, it's a really good length. But I never really set out to explore writing in that length.
I started off writing full-length novels, and then I got that advice, like so many people do, that oh, you should write some short stories because short stories are a great way to get your name out there and get people aware of you, and then they might check out your novels. And I went, yeah okay, no worries, easy! And then discovered that short stories is not easy, and it's a whole different art form, requires a whole different kind of set of skills. The principles are the same, beginning, middle, end, character development, conflict, et cetera. The art of writing short is very different to the art of writing long.
But I'd always love short stories. And when I realized what a challenge it was, it became a challenge to me personally, and I wanted to get good at it. So I really studied on writing short stories, and I ended up getting quite good at it. And I've written a lot now. And a lot of the time, then those stories would start to lengthen out, and it would get to the point where sometimes I'd think I'm writing a short story and it would actually go, actually, this has got to be a novel, and then naturally, that kind of started falling somewhere in the middle.
And I wrote a novella, this is science fiction noir novella that I serialized on my website across almost a year, and then released as a single volume. And that was quite popular. And subsequent to that, I've ended up writing in that length because it's a good way of combining those two skills where you have that immediacy of the short story, but you have a little bit more space for characters and character development like you do in the novel.
[00:07:34] Alan: And when you land it in that middle sort of ground and you land it just right, it can make for really powerful storytelling. And so things like "The Book Club" and "The Roo" that I've written since, they tend to work really well at that length. And it also translates to some degree, if you adapt something for a film, a screen play's about 100 pages. So if you adapt a novel to a film, you end up cutting out a lot of the novel. If you adapt a novella to a film, you can pretty much match one for one, because the sort of size and content is similar. Which is not why I did that, but I'm so influenced by film and graphic novel and stuff like that, I think I naturally fall to that kind of storytelling pace.
And then I got to the point where I ended up writing books like "The Gulp" and "The Fall," which are novella collection, so "The Gulp" and "The Fall," each have five novellas. So that's 10 novellas across two books that each one is an individual story, and across all 10 tells a bigger story. So I've ended up just getting to that sort of point where I end up playing with all sorts of different lengths of things, but I frequently come back to that kind of mid-length of storytelling. Sometimes I end up putting them together in a whole book, sometimes end up releasing them on their own as their own short book.
Yeah, it's an interesting process, and I'm getting back now. At the moment, I'm getting back to full-length novels. I've got a full-length novel coming out in August. Another one's finished and I'm working on another one now. At some point probably before long, I'll get back to that shorter range.
The Creation Process of a Collection of Novellas
I was wondering if, as an example, you could walk us through the evolution or the creation process of one of your collections of novellas. Did you publish each of those novellas separately and then collect them? Were they written with the intention of presenting them together as a collection? How did that come about?
[00:09:17] Alan: That's an unusual sequence of events actually. So if we go back to the end of hang on, what year is it? If we go back to the end of 2019, which is when I wrote "The Roo," as I said, which is just a Gonzo creature feature, it's just a bit of nonsense fun. And it was written almost as a bit of a joke. But it's 30,000 words and it's like this shlock. It was deliberately done as a short book version of a B-grade horror movie, like Kujo or Jaws or whatever, but it's a kangaroo. And I decided, just release that independently, there's no point in trying to look around for a publisher for something like that. And it was a bit of a gag, and it was a bit of fun. But then it went ballistic. It became really popular, went really well, which I was very pleased about.
Then fast forward to the beginning of 2020, and all of a sudden, I'm trying to pivot my day job to Zoom. I've got my kid at home for homeschool, and everything just got disrupted. And I couldn't really concentrate on the bigger novel project that I was working on. So I just put it aside for a while.
And when I started getting back to work, I was like, I should probably just work on some shorter things so that I can just fit them in between all these other changes until we figure out what's going on.
And for a long time, I'd have this idea of writing a series of interconnected stories set in the same place, which is this place called Gulpepper, which is this isolated harbor town on the coast of Australia. People call it "The Gulp," because the place has a habit of swallowing people. And this was something I had as an idea for a long time.
[00:10:39] Alan: And I didn't think I was like, interconnected stories about weird Australian horror, is there really a market for that? I don't know. Should I do that or not?
And after the success of "The Roo," and everybody saying how much they loved how Australian it was, I thought, okay, maybe I should do that. And the original plan was to write a whole bunch of stories set in the same place and sell them ideally to magazines, anthologies or whatever, and just start building this mythology of this place, and then at some point collect them.
But because of the pandemic and everything else that was going on, I started writing these stories and I realized I had this bigger idea where across the first five stories, there's an arc that comes together, and I thought, I might just keep myself busy. I'm going to write all five stories. I'm going to put them together in a single volume. I'm not going to try to publish them first. I'm just going to put out this and just see what happens, because I hadn't done that before. Also knowing that if it did go okay, the next book would be another five stories where I could expand that into one bigger overarching story.
So it gave me the opportunity to write all these different types of horror. Because you know, there's cosmic horror, body horror, crime horror, both books contain a variety of different styles, but all connected by place and character, because they're all set in Gulpepper or around Gulpepper.
It was an experiment off the back of the sort of craziness that was "The Roo." It was an experiment to see if people would be into something that was a bit more serious horror in terms of still very Australian. And because then subsequently, "The Gulp" did do really well, I got to go ahead and write "The Fall" and I put that out as the same way, just as a volume of original stories.
And so I've ended up publishing 10 novellas in two books that never went anywhere else for publishing first. I just put them out as these two volumes. Because of course, if I'd have tried to sell them separately, it's entirely possible I might have sold those stories in different places, I would've made some money from those sales and potentially gained some audience, but then they would be under contract to those places for 6 months or 12 months or whatever. So the collection would then be pushed back.
But in the plague years that we've had, I've enjoyed having the opportunity to just put these books together and put them out while all this other stuff's going on. And now the two volumes are out, and they seem to be doing quite well. So it seems that it was actually, as it turns out, it seems like it was quite a good decision, and I've now established this place that I can revisit in future stories and novels and I've got this whole little, so one of the reviewers called it, "My Castle Rock," king has Castle Rock as his location, which was a great compliment because it's yeah, that's what I'm aiming to do. I want this sandbox that I can repeatedly come back and play in that has this mythology and this history, a variety of different things I can do there.
Does the Novella Format Allow Returning to It?
[00:13:21] Matty: So do you think the fact that they were novellas and not novels makes it easier to sustain that Castle Rock-like approach, because you're leaving more available to continue to go back to, whereas with a novel you might be plumbing one character or a set of characters' experiences so much that it wouldn't really enable you to return to it?
[00:13:44] Alan: Possibly. Yeah, possibly. It's an interesting thought because as well with these books, as novellas, they're all on the shorter end of novellas because none of them are longer than 25,000 words. Most of them are around the 20,000-word mark, which means that you get to really dig deep and tell quite a big story, but the focus is on a fairly tight cast of characters. But because there are 10 stories, we end up with quite a broadcast of characters that occasionally pop up in different stories, and each have their sort of time in the limelight.
And I think it definitely does give me that ability to go back and go, which of these might I draw up more from of those that might, you know, not everyone survives, that's the nature of horror, but of the ones that do, which ones will I draw more from?
[00:14:24] Alan: And it's been really interesting, the feedback and which characters and which stories really resonate with people. And it's quite an interesting sort of barometer in that respect to go, okay, I reckon people will respond if I write more about this character or this group or this event. Whereas other stories that I really enjoyed writing at the time don't have such positive feedback. It's oh, okay, I guess that was enough for those characters.
So yeah, it does give me that opportunity. And apart from anything else, even without revisiting characters, just the place and the surrounds just gives me this environment to set stories that I now know really well. So anything I write there will have that sort of authentic sense of place.
People coming to it new can enjoy that story. People coming to it off the back of "The Gulp" and "The Fall" and everything like that will be like, oh, that's that place, and that's that pub, and it builds that sort of, it’s almost Easter eggs in a way, for readers, because they get all these, ah, that's that pub that was in that story, and that was that. And somebody else would never know that and it doesn't matter, but the people that do know that it's a bit of a treat. So I'm a real nerd for that stuff myself, I love coming across something, that's that character that was in so and so.
[00:15:30] Matty: Yeah, I like that also. Yeah, so I just really get to play with that.
And I'm just about finished on a novel now that's set up in the hills behind Gulpepper, so basically there's hardly any mention of any of it, other than a couple of little passing references to places where they go. And it's just enough for people that have read "The Gulp" or "The Fall" to go, oh, this is the same place. People that haven't, doesn't matter.
[00:15:53] Matty: Yeah.
[00:15:53] Alan: And that's a full-length novel. So yeah, it's just fun to establish something that you can then revisit like that.
Publishing Novellas Individually or as a Collection
[00:16:01] Matty: I do think that a possible benefit of publishing those individually rather than as a collection right off the bat, would be that you would get that input from the readers about, oh, I really love this character, this setting, or this whatever, and focus on that. Did you ever consider that when you were making that decision about whether to publish them one at a time or as a group, the like market research aspect of it?
[00:16:22] Alan: I did, and the original plan was to publish them individually and then collect them later, apart from anything else. Because if nothing else, you get paid twice. You get paid when you sell the story and then you get paid again later when people buy a collection. But in the writing of it, when I realized how interconnected the stories were and how each book makes a bigger story arc, I decided to just stick with it and make it all brand new, and just experiment with it that way. Partly because of the way they ended up. Sort of self-referential like that, the way that they went together, but also largely because if I had of tried to sell them, then sold them, then had to wait out the exclusivity period and everything, the whole process would've been quite fractured, and they wouldn't necessarily have come out in the order that they are in the collection. And given that one story might reference events in another, they do need to be read in order. And so that would've potentially meant trying to sell one until it's sold, knowing when its publication date was, and then the next one. And might have been two years of selling stories before they were all out, another six months before the rights were all back, and so it could have been still two years from now before I got to put out the collection. Whereas I got to do it all at once this way. So
How is Publishing Novellas Different from Novels?
[00:17:40] Matty: Can you describe the logistics of how the publication of the novellas was the same or different than independently publishing a novel-length work?
[00:17:50] Alan: To be honest, it was not really any different. And even now there are people who are referring to both collections as novels. And to some degree, they are like mosaic novels in a way, because there is a thread that goes right through. But really, the process of putting it together of building a sort of a compelling blurb for it, putting it in a good package, making it available, pre-orders, all that sort of stuff, the process was pretty much just the same. And it feels like a lot of people don't really draw that much of a distinction.
When you have a collection of short stories that are all disconnected and they're just collected short stories by the author, that sort of has a different vibe.
[00:18:27] Alan: But I think because this is five stories of "The Gulp," I think I pretty much talked not deliberately, but I think I ended up pretty much talking about it and promoting it the same way I would promote a novel, because it is more a single volume thing. And then when the four came out this year, it was promoted in the same way as a sequel to "The Gulp," which it is, which is more. It's a continuation really, more than a sequel of "The Gulp." So yeah, I think I pretty much approached it the same way as I would at novel.
[00:18:55] Matty: And you didn't have to get five covers or five descriptions, you were packaging it as a package, right?
Yeah, that's right. And it was packaged in that sort of old-school sort of horror way, so it's got that sort of old 80s-90s horror paperback look about it, and it's got that sort of Stranger Things vibe about how it's spoken about and how it's promoted and stuff like that.
A couple of the stories would've been very short to release independently on their own. They would've potentially gone well into an anthology or magazine or something. But by putting both books, both books end up being about, I think, 85,000 words or so, of all the novellas combined. So yeah, they both end up as you say, they get packaged as a single kind of volume and promoted that way.
The other consideration at the time was, do I sell these stories to get paid for the magazines, whatever, and all that exclusivity periods and all that we talked about? The next thought was, do I release each one as a short first and then a combined volume, or do I just go straight to the combined volume? And while getting, as you say, 99 cents for each one, and then a collective volume was appealing financially, it really did come down to that, I don't really want to have to put in the time and the effort to put together five products and then a sixth product as a collection. So I went straight to the collection.
eBooks Facilitate Shorter Novellas and Series
[00:20:18] Alan: But there is definitely a market and a popularity at the moment for shorts on Kindle and chapbooks and stuff like that. And I think that's definitely down to the eBook, because the financial commitment of making a print edition of something available used to be a lot higher than it is now. Of course, you can pretty much make a print edition available fairly easily but a lot of the time, even though you can do it quite easily, the cost is relatively prohibitive for buying because you've still got your print, production, delivery costs involved.
Not in the case with an eBook. You can put a story up that's 5,000 words or 50,000 words, and you can charge 99 cents for it if you want. And I think that's definitely encouraged a lot of people to release shorts and novellas, because for a number of reasons, I think in some ways it helps people to build up their profile, it builds up a back catalog of work, gives people more places to find that author.
In some ways, the downside of it is that people are churning out series because it's so easy to do that, especially with KU or just on Kindle or just on eBook, where they're doing series of novels and each one of those novels is 30,000 or 40,000 words, which is effectively a novella. That can be problematic in a way, for people who are expecting that bigger reading experience, and 60,000, 70,000, 80,000 words plus is what they're expecting to read, and they buy a novel when it's 25,000 words or 30,000 words.
So I know that there is a certain sort of contingent, if you like, that are unhappy about that. But from the people I've spoken to, it seems to me that a lot of the feedback is that if they're priced relatively competitively, so they're not priced too much, often 99 cents or under $3 or $4, it seems that people don't really care too much about the length. If it's 25,000 words or 60,000 words, they don't mind, they just enjoy the reading. If they spend 99 cents or $1.99 on it, then they consider that good value and they're happy to have that reading experience.
[00:22:15] Alan: And then those authors get to put out a number of stories in a series or something without having to commit to a full sort of 60,000 words plus novel each and every time.
So it's interesting how that perception is changing in reader expectations. And I think it's entirely down to the fact that eBooks are so easy to process, to buy, to consume without spending a lot of money, either in the production of them, for the author or in the purchase of them for the reader. That it means that a lot of people are enjoying shorter stories and more often. And as you said yourself, you put out shorts for 99 cents. A lot of people are putting out novel series where no novel in the series is more than 30,000 words, so effectively they're a novella series.
Like my Eli Carver books, there's three of those now. They're all about 30,000, 40,000 words. And basically the publisher, readers, everybody else, they just treat them as a novel series. The Eli Carver novels is what frequently gets referred to. That's fine, that's good for me because they're the perfect length for what they are, because they're this horror crime noir sort of thing. So they work really well at that word length of about 120 pages. Readers are happy with the reading experience that they get. Publisher is happy to keep putting them out. And when I write those stories, I can focus in and make a good, tight, powerful, fast-paced story, which is what you want when you've got that sort of thriller-crime crossover. And reader expectations now are that that's what those books are. They're these short fast-paced novels space novels. Great.
How Short is Too Short?
[00:23:43] Matty: Yeah. I worried maybe more than I should have about readers thinking they were getting a novel length work when they bought my shorts. And so if you go on Amazon or any of the retail sites that support presentation of series, I have the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels, and then I have the Ann Kinnear Suspense Shorts. There are two separate series. The subtitle is, An Ann Kinnear Suspense Short, and the description says, a short story. So I'm trying to put it everywhere, so people aren't surprised. And I do think there's a difference. If somebody was expecting a novel and got 4,000 words, that's different than someone was expecting a novel and got 30,000 words. Like the first one, they're just going to be pissed off. The second one, they could very well be completely happy with that experience.
Yeah, I think that's really key. I think it's really key to be very clear that that's what you're doing. If you have something in a world, a so and so short story, really clear, right up front.
[00:24:32] Matty: Yep.
[00:24:32] Alan: In the description, a short story about, and so people, if they do have a complaint, it's like, well look, sorry, it was right there. Whereas I think as soon as you beat sort of 20,000-30,000 words, you can just put it out as a so and so book. And if it was a 30,000-word book and you were trying to sell it at $8.99, you might have people that would pay that kind of money expecting a full-length novel, and then would be a bit upset about it.
But most of us don't price our work at the top end of those sort of like legacy publisher, eBook prices. Most of independent publishers and small press publishers and people, we tend to price our work in the mid-lower range of pricing anyway. And as you say, I think somebody who expects a novel and gets 30,000 words is just going to be like, oh, that was a short novel, that was cool, and not actually feel offended by it.
But if it is 15,000 words or less, definitely in that short story territory, you really do need to very clearly say, this is a short story. And if it's 99 cents, then let them complain, frankly. They paid less than a dollar for it, you know?
Legacy vs Indy Publishing Clash
The one episode where my guess JK Ellem talked about this very explicitly, was episode 97, "Taking the Long View for Publishing Success." And one of the topics we talked about was that he had done this very careful analysis of profitability against book length. And book length, being a measure of how long it took him to write it. And I think that he said that the sweet spot for him was 60,000 words. That after 60,000 words, he wasn't saying anything more that the readers were clamoring for, and that his earlier books, which were longer, once he scaled back, that it improved the pace. He had other craft-related things in addition to the business-related things. But I had never thought about doing that actual, like the finances of the cost of putting words on the page.
[00:26:20] Alan: This is where legacy publishing and independent publishing clash, because generally speaking, traditional publishing, if you're trying to get a publisher to pick up a novel, you're almost certainly going to see 80,000 to 120,000 words. That's usually the bracket. If you're writing fantasy science fiction, sometimes they'll go a little bit higher, but even then, for a debut, they don't want it to be too big.
Equally, they don't want it to be less. And part of that reason comes back to the old-fashioned bookstore issues, where it's all about shelf real estate. And a spine that's less than 80,000 words is so narrow, it doesn't get noticed. So you need the spine to be wide enough to get noticed.
And that's why big fat fantasy ended up being 250,000 words per volume. Once someone was established, if they wrote a trilogy that took up half a shelf, it pushed out other people. There wasn't room for other books to be there, and those books were really going to get noticed. So it really did, there was a very much an actual physical presence issue with word length.
And legacy publishing is still very much in that mindset. And it's very difficult to sell a book to any of the big publishers that's under 80,000 words. 70,000 words, you might get away with, but that 80,000 to 120,000 words is still considered the sort of sweet spot in terms of book length, and a lot of that has to do with spine width.
Independent publishers who mostly sell eBooks, and if they do sell print editions, they print on demand. It doesn't really matter, they're not going on shelves, it doesn't matter what they look like side on.
Write the Length Your Story Needs to Be
[00:27:46] Alan: A lot of the time, a lot of indies are saying that there's no point in writing above 60,000 words. And a lot of readers seem to not expect that. A lot of readers I think, when they read independent novels, they quite often expect those to be shorter, or they're not surprised when they are shorter. But equally, I think it's really important that whatever it is that you are writing, you write the story the length it needs to be. Often just, because I write sort of horror crime mixed with some fantasy stuff like that, for me, that sweet spot tends to be up to about 100,000 words, but usually somewhere more like 80,000. So I'm on the sort of lower end of that traditional bracket, which is useful, because I still fit in that bracket potentially, if I want to sell somewhere else. But then I have ended up writing a lot of novellas. The Eli Carver novels are all between 30,000 and 40,000 words. "The Roo" is 30,000 words. "The Book Club's" 30,000 words. Every story in "The Gulp" and "The Fall" are all around 20,000-25,000 words. And it's great that we're in an environment now where they can be written and sell to readers alongside anything else without particular distinctions being made on whether it's a novel or not, you know?
How Readers Assess Value
[00:28:55] Matty: It is interesting to think about how readers assess value. And I can look back, especially if I was like in an airport and I was buying a book to read on the airplane. I'm going back a number of years, but part of my assessment was going to be how thick the spine was, because if I was going to spend whatever I was spending for the paperback book, I thought, if it's this thick, it's going to give me more time and more entertainment than if it's this thick.
And it's I think how people assess audiobooks now, if they're on an audiobook subscription, that you're not going to spend your subscription credit on a two-hour book, you're going to look for like, the 20-hour book because you're getting more for your money. And it's interesting how the way people are paying and consuming that work influences their assessment of what good value for money is.
[00:29:37] Alan: Yeah, I think it's true. Like with print, you definitely feel like if I'm going to spend $30, like in Australia, you go to an airport, you probably spend $30 on a new paperback, $30 Australian. And if you spend that on a 400-page book or you spend that on 120-page book, it's a definite perception of value.
With audio you're absolutely right, I've heard from a number of different sources, it is really difficult to sell short audiobooks because often people don't buy lots of audio. They buy one a month, they get their credit, they go and grab something off the wish list. And if they've got a bunch of stuff that's 12, 14, 16 hours, and a couple of things on there that are 6 or 7 hours even, they always tend to default to the one that's going to give them more listening experience.
[00:30:15] Alan: That doesn't seem to translate the same way with eBooks, probably partly because the pricing is in a much narrower band anyway, because you're normally looking at anything between $1 to $10. So if it's 2 hours of reading or 10 hours of reading, that difference in price maybe doesn't seem quite so distinct. But I think that's a lot of why novellas are really popular in eBook, but you'd have trouble selling novellas as audio.
Equally, if we take the Eli Carver as an example, each of those is about, like I said, 35,000 words. So selling them as novellas is not a problem in terms of eBook or in terms of print for that matter too much, although they obviously sell a lot better in eBook. They're not on audio, but I think if they were going onto audio, there's three now that have a fairly strong arc across. And that's probably what I would do, is package those together, so it would be like a boxset in audio, which would come out to about 100,000 words.
[00:31:09] Matty: Yeah.
[00:31:09] Alan: So that would be like a, I don't know, like 10–12-hour audio. And if you do that for one credit, you're more likely to have people pick that up because they're going to feel like they're getting that value for money. Yeah, part one, part two, part three. But yeah, it is a really interesting perception of value and what people are getting for their money. And eBooks are the only one that doesn't seem to have that. But that really does come down to pricing in that narrow band, I think.
Traditional Publishers Paying for Novellas
[00:32:05] Matty: Well, we've talked a lot about some independent publishing options, but you had mentioned that there are traditional publishers who are paying good advances for novellas. So do you want to talk about that a little bit?
[00:32:18] Alan: Yeah, yeah. It's interesting, the sort of legacy publishers if you like, like the Big Four, Big Five, whatever it is these days. They're still very much in that old-fashioned mindset of novels and all that sort of thing. But a lot of the small press, and a lot of the sort of specialist imprints of the bigger press are starting to catch on that actually novellas are really popular.
Probably the biggest of them is Tor. And Tor have a novella line where they pay a pretty significant advance, and they produce really good novellas.
Advance Payments with Traditional Publishers
[00:32:48] Alan: A number of mid-sized small press or independent press are frequently opening for novels and novellas so anything up to x words. And they're getting in on that, what we've talked about, the fact that you can sell those in eBooks as the majority line, but you make it available in print on demand, doesn't have associated upfront costs. And if people are prepared to pay what it costs to buy that print edition, they will.
But a lot of those publishers like Tor, pay a good advance. Some other publishers would, but also a lot of the independent or small press these days, we definitely seem to be getting to that stage where a lot of publishers are not paying advances, especially on novellas or shorter stuff, but they are packaging a really good book. They're putting the sort of power of their reach and their social media behind things, which is great for getting readers.
But because that's the case and they're not paying advances on this stuff, I think it's really important to try to negotiate a better royalty rate when you do these things. It's like, well, if you're not going to pay an advance, I want a higher royalty, especially on eBooks. And you can negotiate a rising royalty. Okay, so after X number of copies sold, the royalty goes up to this amount. So those are things that you can try to negotiate with these publishers.
I do wish everybody would still pay an advance if it's traditional publishing, even if it's a small advance, few hundred dollars, it's just that little kick of confidence. They're going to have to recoup their production costs and at least that much, so they're going to push it at least that much. Which is the whole point of an advance, really, it's the publisher going, we believe in this, here's some money in advance. We're going to make at least this much back; this is the plan. Obviously, lots of things don't earn out, and the bigger the advance, the more likely it is to not earn out.
[00:34:27] Alan: It would be good if even the small publishers did still. Offer even small advances for everything they put out, but just the economics of it is difficult these days. But if they don't offer an advance, you still get potentially the benefit of them putting together and packaging a good-looking book, and you have the weight of that publisher and that publisher reputation behind your work, which can help you to gain readers.
And at the end of the day, that's what you want. You want to increase your overall pool of readers. So that's what you've got to figure out, I guess. Is it worth going that route in order to expand your readership?
Publishing a Novella
[00:34:59] Matty: If there's a new author who's looking to submit, do you think the traditional publishers would be primarily interested in novellas from authors that they're already working with on novels, or could someone right off the bat, submit a novella and have a reasonable chance of being considered?
[00:35:18] Alan: Yeah, they could, especially more and more so now, I do quite a lot of work with Grey Matter Press, and they have a whole Emergent Expressions line now, which is basically where they're looking for new authors with novellas and sort of short novels, to pick up and find new voices. And that's what they're looking for and how they're marketing it. A lot of the time, publishers take a chance on someone with a novella to see how it sells as well. If they're running a novella line, you definitely don't need any sort of history of novels or anything to get in on that level. What they want is a quality novella, so yeah, absolutely.
And it can be a really great place for people to start because you can build a backlist of short fiction, magazines, anthologies or whatever, which subsequently gets your name out there, but can be a bit hard to track down. Whereas if you've had a novella published, that's a book that's available somewhere. You can direct people straight to that book, that's by me. So yeah, if people are open for novellas, you definitely don't need to think that you need any kind of history at all. If you've got a good novella, you've got a much a chance at anyone else.
[00:36:15] Matty: Where would you recommend that people go to find what publishers may be looking for novella-length works?
[00:36:21] Alan: It's really a case of looking into who's publishing novellas and checking guidelines.
That's what it always comes down to in the end. And trying to figure out which publishers are publishing the sort of novellas that are in line with the sort of stuff that you're writing. When it comes to genre fiction, science fiction, fantasy, horror in particular, Tor from that novella point of view, Tor is still the benchmark. As far as I know, they've got the biggest advance, they've got a big distribution network. So definitely a great place to get in on, but equal, it's incredibly hard to get anything through there because they pick and choose, and they've got a very specific sort of idea of what they want.
You come down a tier and a lot of the other independent presses, like Grey Matter Press or Crystal Lake Publishing or places like this, they're frequently opening for novellas and looking for things. And it's really just a case of having a look around, seeing who's publishing novellas, if they match the sort of genre style of what it is that you are doing and check guidelines, see when they're open and take your shot. That's yeah, really what it comes down to. And deciding for yourself, do you want to go that route? Because as we know, if you do it independently, there's all that work involved with cover, editing, everything else. All that gets taken away if you go with a publisher. They do all that for you. That's the primary reason to go with a publisher. But, and obviously then the reach that they have and the potentially expanded audience.
[00:37:38] Alan: But is that worth the cut of royalties that they're going to take? That's where you're always going to balance up. But especially if you're relatively new to the game, you haven't got a readership, it's entirely likely that you're not going to get much in the way of royalties because it's very difficult to get noticed. And if that publisher can give you a little bit of a boost in making people aware of you, then it's worth sharing your royalties with them.
Publishers Increasingly Targeting Novella Lines
[00:38:01] Matty: It would also be interesting to see the difference in profitability of authors who are positioning or publishers who are positioning these shorter 30,000-40,000 word works as explicitly as novellas versus novels. I had mentioned about the conversation with JK Ellem that he was writing what I think many people in the publishing world would consider a shorter novel, but it was meeting the needs of his readers and so he was producing novels more quickly, not producing novellas. It's just an interesting mindset when you're trying to make the maximum profit from your creative work.
[00:38:40] Alan: Yeah, I think a lot of people, a lot of publishers are specifically sort of targeting if you like, novella line. I think there is a sort of rise in awareness, and to some degree, a rise in popularity of the novella. People are, ah, this is a great novella, these people put out great novellas. And so I think some publishers are embracing that, and this is our novella line. They're priced accordingly compared to the novel line, great introduction to people's work. If you don't know the author, you can spend a couple of bucks on 30,000 words, which is much less time and money commitment than a full-length novel potentially, and go, oh, actually I really like this person's work.
And so a lot of publishers are deliberately trying to target new business, if you like, with a novella line. How successful that is, I don't know for sure. From my own perspective, I've been in the game a while and for a long time, I've been writing short stories and full-length novels and novellas, and my kind of readership blurs together. And I've noticed that in terms of my readers, it doesn't seem to make much distinction. They will talk about like a full-length novel, like "Devouring Dark," they will talk about the same way as a novella like "Manifest Recall." They'll just refer to them both as you know, "Alan Baxter books," which is fine with me, that's great.
[00:39:51] Matty: Yeah.
[00:39:51] Alan: When it comes to picking up new readers, I'm not sure how well, I'm not sure how much a novella versus a novel versus whatever sort of appeals. And it's something I've thought about, I should maybe try to promote things for what they are, to see if it does draw people in. If I'm talking about "Manifest Recall," I should try to promote it as a novella, check out this action-packed, short novel. I've got a new novel out in August called "Sallow Bend," and I am making a point of saying, this is my first full-length novel since 2018's "Devouring Dark." I haven't released a full-length novel in four years, which wasn't deliberate in any way, partly down to publishing, partly down to pandemic, partly down to the fact that I ended up concentrating on "The Gulp" and "The Fall" for a couple of years, because so much was going on. But I am making a point of promoting "Sallow Bend" as a full-length novel. Which it is, it's coming out through Cemetery Dance and it's close to 100,000 words. And it's a full-length folk horror novel, and I'm using that fact that it's my first full-length novel in four years to some degree as a promotional tool going, if you've been waiting for a bigger story from me, here it is.
Equally, "The Gulp" and "The Fall," they're each the length of a full-length novel. They're just divided into stories, so it's a bit more sort of mosaic. All three Eli Carver books together are the equivalent of a full-length novel, but they're three separate stories. So I think I need to try to make sure I talk about things a bit more like that, so that you get that appeal across. These are shorter, they go together. These are longer, this is a full-length novel or whatever.
But for the moment, I am actively using the fact that "Sallow Bend" is the first full-length novel in four years as a point of interest to see if that catches people's eye. And it seems to, I've had a few people talk about, oh, I can't wait for this, this is exciting, it's great to get back into something longer by you.
It's like, okay, cool. So I don't know if that will subsequently attract more readers as well. If they want to find out something from me, here's a full-length standalone novel, you can check it out. We'll see, I don't know.
Test the Naming in A/B Tests for Ads
For authors who aren't explicitly taking advantage of that fact that, as you're saying, the first full-length novel in a while, it would be interesting to run ads that would be, ones that took that 30,000-40,000-word work, called it a novel in some, called it a novella in others. Run that as an A/B test and then the other axis of the A/B test would be ads to people who are in your follower base, ads to people who are not in your follower base and see how that turned out.
[00:42:16] Alan: It would be an interesting experiment to run, wouldn't it? And yeah, see, particularly for people who are not already readers, who aren't in that follower base, it would be very interesting to see what sort of percentage return you got on something specifically tagged as a novella over a novel. That would be quite interesting to do.
A lot of the time, like when the third Eli Carver book came out last year, and a lot of the time, I was promoting that as a new short novel with Eli Carver. When Eli Carver story continues in the new short novel "Ghost Recall." Because I was, for a little while there, I was experimenting with how people responded to the term, short novel, as opposed to novella. And to be honest, I never really gathered enough data to know how much of an impact that made.
But people's response to it didn't seem particularly positive or negative that I was calling it a short novel. Yeah, I found that I need to find a way I think, of experimenting a bit more clearly on that stuff, because at the time, it occurred to me, I wonder how many people know quite what a novella is. Because there's definitely a raised awareness these days. A lot of people know what a novella is, but then frequently, you still get people go, what's a novella, how's that different to a novel? And you just go, it's basically the same, it's just a short novel. And they're like, why don't you just call it short novel?
[00:43:33] Matty: Yeah. And it's a good question. Why don't you?
[00:43:35] Matty: Yeah. The term that I still think sounds funny is novelette. I don't know that I'm ever going to be able to hear the novelette not feel like I'm reading something from the 30s or something like that. It sounds very old-fashioned to me.
[00:43:45] Alan: Yeah. And I honestly, I don't know why it exists. Let me go back to those awards and those categories, I think it was introduced so that if you have a short story that's 15,000 words long, it's very hard, I don't think it actually is, but the perception was that it was very hard to compare that to something that was only 4,000 or 5,000 words long. And so it's a little bit unfair to put those things together. I don't actually think it necessarily it's because some of the most powerful short stories are like 4,000 words. Some 15,000 words short stories are very cool, but they're not necessarily, they could easily be a lot shorter.
Anyway, the awards drew that distinction, they said, okay, short story is up to 7,500 words. But then you couldn't have a novella that was 9,000 words.
Yeah. That's still a short story, that doesn't count as a short novel by any stretch of the imagination. So they created novelette, which went from 7,501 words up to 17,500. So that allowed them to have a novella was anything 17,500 to 40,000. That seems fair, like anything over 16,000-17,000 words starts to have that short book vibe about it.
But why they didn't just extend short story to 15,000 words and have novella 15,000 to 40,000? I don't understand why they created this novelette thing in the middle. And like you said, it even sounds weird. It sounds like something you'd find in a kitchen in the 50s, oh, we'll blend that up in the novelette and then we'll, so I don't quite understand why. I don't know why it exists. It annoys me. And within "The Gulp" and "The Fall," a couple of those stories technically are novelettes, because there's a couple of them that are more like 15,000 words than 20,000 but I'm like, what, I just, they're novella collections. I just can't be bothered. And if people want to call them short story collections, I'm okay with that as well, because even the longest one in there is less than 25,000. You can call them what you like, it's a mosaic novel, I don't get care, because they're single volumes.
[00:45:34] Matty: Yeah, the really brave tester of ads can run the C test. They'll have the A/B test, to see the A and B test and then the C test where we call it a novelette and see if anybody bites.
[00:45:44] Alan: Yeah. What the hell is a novelette? Is that a type of clothing? What is it? I don't know. It's just, it's such a weird word, I don't like it.
[00:45:53] Matty: Well, Alan thank you so much. This has been such an interesting conversation, and it sounds like you have all sorts of stuff coming up, so please let the listeners and viewers know where they can find out more about you and all you're doing online.
[00:46:04] Alan: No worries. Yeah, it's been a pleasure. It's an interesting subject and it's one I think is still developing and we're still all how it goes as well. It seems to be changing a lot, it's one of those things that seems to be constantly in flux. So it's interesting to watch.
But yes, my website is a central point for everything. You can track down all my social media and books and all that sort of stuff. So that's just my name, AlanBaxter.com.au will take you there. I spend way too much time on Twitter, just @AlanBaxter. So you can find me there. This was so interesting.
[00:46:35] Alan: No worries. Thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure.
A question for you ...
Have you written a novella, and what has your experience with that form been, both from a creative and a business point of view? If you haven’t tried your hand at a novella yet, did Alan convince you to give it a try?
I’d love to hear your thoughts!
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