Kevin O. McLaughlin
Mystagogue
I agree with the length comments above.
Already, we're seeing short stories make a huge resurgence. The almost dead novella is back with a vengeance, and novels in the 40-60k word range are suddenly common, where just three years ago they were rare.
Part of this is that freedom to write stories to whatever length you want. But part of this is simple economics:
It takes longer to write one 150k doorstopper (can we CALL a novel that now, with over half of the fiction sold in the US this month expected to be ebook formats?) than it does to create three 50k novels. The shorter works are just simpler to create. But readers (right now anyway) are happy to pay novel prices for a 50k word book, but are unwilling to pay 3x that for a 150k word book by the same writer.
In other words, if you're a writer with a fanbase willing to pay $5 for your latest 50k work, you're unlikely to sell many copies of a 150k word for $15.
So that 150k book is more than three times as hard, but you'll get much less than three time as much income from it. AND, you'll produce less books per year - but there's very clear evidence that the more titles an author produces per year, the better all those works will sell (assuming all are good, well written, well edited, well produced stories).
So more books means more sales per book, and more books means more books to sell. Shorter works means more books per year, which means more income for the writer AND more visibility for all those works.
Added up, it means there is going to be a very strong economic force pushing book length down.
Already, we're seeing short stories make a huge resurgence. The almost dead novella is back with a vengeance, and novels in the 40-60k word range are suddenly common, where just three years ago they were rare.
Part of this is that freedom to write stories to whatever length you want. But part of this is simple economics:
It takes longer to write one 150k doorstopper (can we CALL a novel that now, with over half of the fiction sold in the US this month expected to be ebook formats?) than it does to create three 50k novels. The shorter works are just simpler to create. But readers (right now anyway) are happy to pay novel prices for a 50k word book, but are unwilling to pay 3x that for a 150k word book by the same writer.
In other words, if you're a writer with a fanbase willing to pay $5 for your latest 50k work, you're unlikely to sell many copies of a 150k word for $15.
So that 150k book is more than three times as hard, but you'll get much less than three time as much income from it. AND, you'll produce less books per year - but there's very clear evidence that the more titles an author produces per year, the better all those works will sell (assuming all are good, well written, well edited, well produced stories).
So more books means more sales per book, and more books means more books to sell. Shorter works means more books per year, which means more income for the writer AND more visibility for all those works.
Added up, it means there is going to be a very strong economic force pushing book length down.
On the other hand, maybe I don't? I'm not a big fan of series that go on forever -- I want to tell a story, and have it end, and be done with it so I can move on to something else. Maybe it would make sense to release it in smaller parts for $1.99 or $2.99 apiece (that's the 70% royalty level on Amazon so I kind of wouldn't want to go below that). I could always release an omnibus edition later on for $6 or $7 that combines all the parts. The story isn't really structured to be split that way... although there are some cliffhanger points it could be split at... Hm.