Novels VS. Novellas
Currently, I am working on two projects. It’s made me think a bit harder about how I want to keep doing things, so I want to solicit feedback to get a feel.
Order Bound happened as an accident. The scenes that became that story started out as nothing more than the first chapter of Faytown Calling. I knew I wanted Gus in that book, so I started it with Virgil being involved in his knighting. The more detail I added, the longer the chapter became and eventually I felt I could do more with his intro in a standalone. Besides, Faytown was becoming so freaking long that I knew there needed to be cuts.
It was, to me at least, a happy accident. I loved writing that story and am super proud of how it came out. But right now, it’s also the lowest selling in the Virgil series. It’s hard to know exactly how many people have read it because most of my activity is coming from Kindle Unlimited and the reporting is weird, but it is safe to say it PALES in comparison to either Sorcerer Rising or FayTown Calling. Probably by a factor of ten, it’s that big a difference.
I don’t care about the money. If I was doing this for the money, none of my books would exist. What worries me the most is that there are people missing content from the story of Virgil McDane and that the reason for that is because of the format I think it should be in. I sort of love the concept of these 1.5 stories as little vignettes where Virgil gets to go and screw around somewhere in some random adventure that I don’t want to wrap an entire book around. Sometimes important things will happen, sometimes they won’t. They’ll flesh out the world and characters and all kinds of stuff. This ties into the way I have always consumed my favorite shows. I love for shows to be serialized, but some of the best episodes are those bottle episodes or monster of the week moments that take you out of the “main” storyline.
But, and this is key, do I simply like writing them more than people actually like reading them?
Part of this is where we get into the business of writing. I don’t want to let that dictate things but it’s a bit of a factor.
First is price. Amazon’s royalty structure starts gets slashed if the book is less than $2.99. For a short story, I really don’t want to charge that. But for a novella, I think that’s reasonable. If people disagree, fine, I could get behind that and lower accordibgly. Like I said, money isn’t really the point to this and I think the novels are key to that even it was.
The big thing though is visibility. Amazon allows you to organize books in a series so that they link to each other on a series page. Part of that linking is the increment of the book, but it’s not required. Sorcerer Rising is 1, FayTown Calling is two. I wanted Order Bound to literally be 1.5 but they don’t allow that. I tie it together in the bibliography page but that’s not the same as Amazon’s sales pages doing it.
I have already given an update on Pilfered Souls. That is my next planned novel for Virgil. But, in addition to that, I have a plan for a story in between (it has three names right now…). I love the idea but it’s probably not a full novel but maybe it should be if it’s a story I want to tell. Like I said already, Order Bound was an accident. I don’t think it could or really should have ever been a novel. This next one, though, could probably go either way.
I had to tell myself to stop worrying about it because it was stressing me out. And, in general, that’s how I’m approaching it. I’m writing both of these because the events in the “novella” won’t have much of an impact on Pilfered Souls and I can bounce back and forth when I get in a ritual or get bored.
But eventually, the length will become a question and I’ll have to decide how much to put in this story. I like the idea of the novellas in between, but I want to know if I’m the only one.
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