Books, Novellas and Novellettes

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by stonetools

As the world moves over to ebooks, such categories as short story, novelette, novella,and novel may disappear.

It looks like there may be just two lengths of ebook - the single ( pretty much anything up to 70 pages (17,500 words) and priced 99-3.99 and the "novel/nonfiction book ", which could be priced up to 14.99.

Many of the digital first publishers out there sell tons of books in the shorter categories. If anything I've encountered more, not less.

[stonetools]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

Many of the digital first publishers out there sell tons of books in the shorter categories. If anything I've encountered more, not less.

I think the move to ebooks has reinvigorated the short form.
I think its great for writers are good at both forms. Steven King, for example , is IMO even better at shorter lengths.
I can also see it better for beginning writers. In the olden days, you would master the shorter forms , selling to the magazines, THEN move on to the novel.
Now beginning authors want to try the novel in one big jump. Unsurprisingly, they generally fail.
Now the old way is economically possible again.

[tecweston]

Originally Posted by QuantumIguana

There's no "cult". People just want to know how long the works are before they buy them.

Yeah. The most I've paid for an ebook is $15, for the 1000-page "1Q84" and the 1100-page "A Dance with Dragons." $15 for that much book is worth it to me, because I know I'll be reading it for weeks. But there's no way I'd pay that much for a 200- or 300-page novel. I'll wait for the paperback, borrow it from the library, or obtain it via "other" means if I absolutely cannot wait. Knowing how long the book is before I buy it is very important to me, so much so that sometimes I'll find the book in an actual bookstore just to see how much "book" there is.

[Yapyap]

Having word counts displayed on the ebook page is no different than having page counts displayed on the paper book page.

I mean, no one seems to be up in arms about how some book's page says 256 pages and another's says 512 pages and yet another one is 768 pages - and plenty of people seem to buy and read the shorter ones. Not everyone loves to read the massive ones.

And taking away page counts would be rather silly as well as unfair for online shops, as people can visually tell a slim book from a thick book in a brick-and-mortar shop. Adding word counts for ebooks would just be the next logical step.

[JD Gumby]

Originally Posted by Yapyap

Having word counts displayed on the ebook page is no different than having page counts displayed on the paper book page.

I mean, no one seems to be up in arms about how some book's page says 256 pages and another's says 512 pages and yet another one is 768 pages - and plenty of people seem to buy and read the shorter ones. Not everyone loves to read the massive ones.

And, as was pointed out, it allows the consumer to see when they're charging the same price for those different book sizes (even though they're likely to be around $8.99, $10.99, and $11.99-$12.99 on the shelf for those three sizes, at least here in Canada; less for the 256-pager if its a Harlequin Romance or some other grocery store shelf genre).

As an example, Kobo is selling Stephen King's "The Mist" for $7.99 and his "'Salem's Lot" for $6.59. For the editions using the covers shown on Kobo's site, we get 240 pages for the latest edition of "The Mist" (though though that's with a fairly large font and spacing - in ''Skeleton Crew'' it was 130 pages) and 672 pages for "'Salem's Lot" (also a larger font - the '91 New American Library edition is 496 pages and the Gallery Books edition from 2000 is 480 pages). Bit of a difference with no indication on the site (and few people are going to go look up at Amazon like I just did) - anyone familiar with King's work finding ''The Mist'' for the first time this way is going to be VERY disappointed from an experience length standpoint.

[Yapyap]

Price is really only relevant for me when it's a short story/novelette - I wouldn't want to pay a full-length novel price for those. (Not that I care for short stories/novelettes anyway, but I make the occasional exception for those set in the same universe as a series I've read and enjoyed.)

For novels (say, anything above 60,000 words), I don't really consider length an important factor in pricing - it's the description / author / other stuff that determines whether I want to buy a book at the set price or not.

I don't think I've ever even deliberated between 3-4 books of a similar price and made the decision based on the length/thickness; it's still "which one of these sounds the best content-wise / which one do I want to read the most" that is the most relevant factor. (But again, I'm the sort of person who's a lot more likely to avoid a 800+ page book because of the length, unless I have good reason to expect I'll enjoy it.)

It's definitely something that would be useful to many other people though, and with ebooks, it would be such a simple thing to include... I mean, even the publishers don't provide the information, I'd assume that there would be a relatively simple way to do an automatic word count on the provided file (and perhaps round it up/down so that it won't look ridiculous, e.g. 142,900 or 143,000 words instead of 142,887 words).

[JD Gumby]

Originally Posted by Yapyap

It's definitely something that would be useful to many other people though, and with ebooks, it would be such a simple thing to include... I mean, even the publishers don't provide the information, I'd assume that there would be a relatively simple way to do an automatic word count on the provided file (and perhaps round it up/down so that it won't look ridiculous, e.g. 142,900 or 143,000 words instead of 142,887 words).

It would be trivial to implement - but there is currently no incentive for publishers to give any indication as to whether you're buying a novel, novella, or short story for that $7.99 or whatever. :/

[Yapyap]

Originally Posted by JD Gumby

It would be trivial to implement - but there is currently no incentive for publishers to give any indication as to whether you're buying a novel, novella, or short story for that $7.99 or whatever. :/

That's really only the case for e-published only / self-published books though, isn't it? Almost all traditionally published books tend to have a paper version available (or at least listed) as well, after all, and that always seems to come with a page count, at least on Amazon, so it would be hard to hide whether it's a novel or a short story.

I've noticed that quite a few self-published authors have started to include word count, or, for shorter works, an indication of it being a novella/short story somewhere in the description on Amazon. And Smashwords includes word count automatically, I think.