Quote:
Originally Posted by Pulpmeister
[...] W Somerset Maugham published "Up at the Villa" as a book in 1953, which ran to 30,000 words. He described it as a "novelette". I guess that's a professional's opinion!
|
Well, a publishers opinion. In the '80s, Stephen King produced three very long paperbacks containing four novellas each. The first,
Different Seasons, was a 560 page paperback which, at a guess, places the stories around 35k, maybe 40k, words each. The next books (
The Backman Books and
Four Past Midnight) got progressively longer (860 pages, 930 pages).
But in all these examples the stories were complete and stood well on their own. No one would complain, now, of buying these individually - at the right price. But, as crich70 noted, no one is going to be happy buy the 1954 published
The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R.Tolkien (which is, what?, 140k words or something) and discover that they only have 1/3rd of the story.
My current work-in-progress, which has been a work-in-progress for far too long now, suffers from the too-long-for-a-single-novel problem. With ebooks it may not matter on a technical level but matters very much as to what you can market. What I consider to be the first book (approx 90k words, there is a definitely break at this point) is obviously not the finish of the story, but it's definitely novel length in print terms. Marketing this - if it ever gets finished - is going to present difficulties.