Short Novel or Long Story?

[randyflycaster]

I published an ebook of about 11,500 words. Can I market this as a short novel? I was told that any story over 10,000 words is a short novel, but I don't want to mislead anyone. Is describing my work as a long story better?

Thanks,

Randy

[Lemurion]

By SFWA standards that's a novelette, though some might call it a very short novella. It's too short to market honestly as a novel.

[DavidRM]

I would call that a long short story. But I have no official standing on anything. =)

-David

[Steven Lake]

Originally Posted by DavidRM

I would call that a long short story. But I have no official standing on anything. =)

-David

Add my vote to yours.

[crich70]

It does sound more like a long short story. Of course you could always try to find a way to add a subplot or two that work with it and expand it into a full novel if you don't want to market as a short story.

[Steven Lake]

crich70 has a good idea. Writing novels for most people is not as easy as writing short stories. It's how I started out writing books. Learning to expand and expound your story, build background, etc, is a lot harder and plenty of work. So what you may want to do is use this as a practice to help you increase your story size. One good method I found to do that is to set yourself a word count goal. Mine was, and still is to some extent, 70k words. Now while the word count isn't important in the overall story, knowing you have a goal to work towards actually forces you to work harder to expand and improve your story. IE, it gives you something solid and concrete to shoot for. Then, later on in your writing, it helps to tell you if you're being too long winded in a story or not. lol.

[randyflycaster]

Thanks so much. I don't want to expand my story. I guess I was concerned from the marketing angle, especially because I'm charging $2.99 on Amazon. I wanted to charge less, but $2.99 seems like the minimum.

I don't want readers to feel I'm misleading them by not giving them a longer work.

Any suggestions?

Randy

[ChupaLibro]

Just refer to it as a novelette. My next story is in the editing stages and it clocks in at 12,500+ words. I plan to market it as a novelette (per the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's definition). Nothing wrong with that.

[DavidRM]

I'm planning to release a novella in January that is composed of 4 related short stories. 1 of the "short stories" is 18,400 words in length (almost a novella on its own). The total length of the work will be just over 30K words. I'm planning to charge $2.99.

-David

[BookCat]

randy, at this length I'd suggest either putting it with one or two other short works, or allowing readers to pay what they want, which will usually be nothing, but not always. The latter option allows the story to act as a "taster" of your work and gather a fan base who will pay for your other writing.

[Luke King]

I'd say a short story is usually 10 000 words or under. Once you're over 10 000 words, you probably have a novelette, though it depends to some degree on the structure of the story. Does it have chapters, for instance? Is there a character arc? A problem, complications, a resolution?

Either way, whether you want to call it a short story or a novelette, I think you should be giving some indication to readers in the blurb by writing something along the lines of "a short story by . . . "

[John Carroll]

I believe these are fairly standard word counts from most of the sites I've seen including this one: http://www.fictionfactor.com/articles/wordcount.html

Micro-Fiction: up to 100 words
Flash Fiction: 100 - 1,000 words
Short Story: 1,000 - 7,500 words
Novellette: 7,500 - 20,000 words
Novella: 20,000 - 50,000 words
Novel: 50,000 -110,000
Epics and Sequels: Over 110,000 words

[DavidRM]

"Novellette" is a jargon word. It means nothing to the reading public. The term "novella" supercedes it in the public mind. So there's something of a void between 10K words and 20K words.

I don't have a solution or a workaround. Just saying. =)

-David