02-27-2012, 10:55 AM | #1 |
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Books, Novellas and Novellettes
I hear these terms bounced around a lot what are the differences between these three catagories? I believe that the difference is one of length.
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02-27-2012, 11:04 AM | #2 | |
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Short story: up to 7500 words Novelette: 7500 - 17500 words Novella: 17500 to 40000 words Novel: Over 40000 words |
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02-27-2012, 11:04 AM | #3 |
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Well "books" doesn't quite belong lumped in with those since pretty much annything can be called a book, but... yes, it's based on length.
Novel > novella > novelette The word counts can vary. (I myself, don't really see a need for a distinction between novelette and short-story) |
02-27-2012, 11:07 AM | #4 |
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The distinction between the novel and the novella is a matter of length. Here is how the Science Fiction Writers of America make the distinction:
Novel over 40,000 words Novella 17,500 to 40,000 words Novelette 7,500 to 17,500 words Short story under 7,500 words Other groups have different cutoff points, of course. Now, 'book', that's a different matter, and gets a bit tricky. People tend to think of 'book' and 'novel' as being synonymous, but they really aren't. A book can be any length. In the days of paper books, if it was bound like a book, it was a book. A magazine is a book by some definitions, it is printed on paper and has a cover. But because it has a thin paper cover rather than a stiff cover, and because it tends to be more than just text, we think of it as distinct from a book. Even paperback books tend to be more durable than magazines. There get to be some gray areas. If I read an article on an e-reader, am I reading a book? If it was bound in a (relatively) stiff cover, people would call it a book. |
02-27-2012, 11:08 AM | #5 |
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02-27-2012, 11:56 AM | #6 | |
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I've never really heard of a novelette (except mentioned in a Belle & Sebastian song), but the way I've always thought it went was, a short story is up to 50 pages or so, a novella is 50-150 pages, and a novel is anything over that. Is that about right? |
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02-27-2012, 12:00 PM | #7 |
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I've never seen any "page" equivalents, myself. Since they would tend to vary quite a bit with font-size, line-spacing, page-size, margins and whatnot.
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02-27-2012, 12:27 PM | #8 | |
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You can do the math from there. |
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02-27-2012, 12:32 PM | #9 | |
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Here's a slightly different take: http://www.fictionfactor.com/articles/wordcount.html When it comes to fiction ebooks the whole word count thing is becoming irrelevant and we're seeing a breakdown of the categories into (mostly) short-stories and novels, with bigger novels (100K+) no longer scaring anybody. (And, of course, with ebooks page count is meaningless to start with). |
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02-27-2012, 12:36 PM | #10 |
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We need more sizes: Noveltina, Novelzilla for example.
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02-27-2012, 12:42 PM | #11 |
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There's also chapbooks, at least in print, but I suppose they would fit under short story too. They're usually about 20 pages or so.
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02-27-2012, 12:46 PM | #12 |
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02-27-2012, 12:51 PM | #13 |
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The noveloid falls right in my personal reading wheelhouse.
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02-27-2012, 01:10 PM | #14 |
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I propose a new category: the novelego. In Esperanto, the 'eg' suffix means big. In Esperanto, 'novel' is 'romano', and 'novella' is 'romaneto'. I haven't seen the word used, but 'romanego' would imply something larger than a novel. If we borrowed the 'eg' prefix, we could have 'novelego' as a category for something larger than a novel, and some of the giant tomes really seem like they aren't quite in the same category as other novels.
Of course, I have no expectation that novelego, or any term like it would actually be adopted... |
02-27-2012, 01:27 PM | #15 |
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...and the InfiniNovel for those books that never seem to end.
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