Jaime Rush's Blog - Posts Tagged "novellas"
First Offspring e-book now 99 cents!
If you've been thinking about trying the Offspring, my publisher just dropped the price of the first book to .99! Amazing! http://www.harpercollins.com/books/Pe...
The Offspring: Sexy…dangerous…outcasts who possess extraordinary psychic abilities. They must band together to find the truth and fight an enemy out to destroy them.
And coming soon, a novella in the Offspring world: The Darkness Within. It will be available in e-format (Mar 13) and paper (Mar 31) This is a separate group so new readers can jump right in.
I love writing novellas. They're a great taste of a story, with plenty of drama, romance and action, but quick enough to write in a week or so. I started out writing short stories, so this is a nice way to come back to that, albeit longer than what I used to write.
The Offspring: Sexy…dangerous…outcasts who possess extraordinary psychic abilities. They must band together to find the truth and fight an enemy out to destroy them.
And coming soon, a novella in the Offspring world: The Darkness Within. It will be available in e-format (Mar 13) and paper (Mar 31) This is a separate group so new readers can jump right in.
I love writing novellas. They're a great taste of a story, with plenty of drama, romance and action, but quick enough to write in a week or so. I started out writing short stories, so this is a nice way to come back to that, albeit longer than what I used to write.
The short and sweet of it
A couple of years ago my publisher invited me to participate in an anthology (Bitten by Cupid, Avon Books). I jumped at the change, for many reasons. But I have to admit, I was a bit nervous. Okay, I started my writing with short stories, so short format was easy for me. But I hadn't looked back since I wrote that first too-long-to-be-a-short story book, which was a category romance of about 55,000 words. My subsequent twenty-three books tend to be 90,000-110,000 words, always depending on the story that needs to be told. I wrote four Harlequin category romances that were about 55,000 words a long time ago. I'd never written a roughly 25,000 word story.
Well, I did, and found that I really enjoyed it. Yes, it was hard to pack in a full romance AND a suspense plot in that length of a book. But it was nice not to have to plot out the many ups and downs and twists that occur in a full-length book. Plus, editing was so much nicer. I do three rounds of edits before the book is sent to my editor. Editing 120 pages is a lot quicker than 400 pages. Especially that last edit.
Now I've written four more novellas. Maybe I'm an addict, since I was the one who took the initiative to do them. Two are in my Offspring world (The Darkness Within came out in March 2012) and two introduce readers to a whole new series (The Hidden). The problem usually lies in that I want to explore the characters and their stories more, or I think that I'd like to now develop these particular characters in a full length book … only I've already committed them to the storyline (each set of novellas is tied together).
The nice thing is that because they're released in electronic form, there really is no limit. I know they have to be meaty and long enough to engage the reader. They also should be short enough to still be a novella. But short and sweet is pretty nice. A great price point, a good way for new readers to try out an author's world/voice, and fun for the author!
What do you think of novellas? What do you like and dislike about them?
Well, I did, and found that I really enjoyed it. Yes, it was hard to pack in a full romance AND a suspense plot in that length of a book. But it was nice not to have to plot out the many ups and downs and twists that occur in a full-length book. Plus, editing was so much nicer. I do three rounds of edits before the book is sent to my editor. Editing 120 pages is a lot quicker than 400 pages. Especially that last edit.
Now I've written four more novellas. Maybe I'm an addict, since I was the one who took the initiative to do them. Two are in my Offspring world (The Darkness Within came out in March 2012) and two introduce readers to a whole new series (The Hidden). The problem usually lies in that I want to explore the characters and their stories more, or I think that I'd like to now develop these particular characters in a full length book … only I've already committed them to the storyline (each set of novellas is tied together).
The nice thing is that because they're released in electronic form, there really is no limit. I know they have to be meaty and long enough to engage the reader. They also should be short enough to still be a novella. But short and sweet is pretty nice. A great price point, a good way for new readers to try out an author's world/voice, and fun for the author!
What do you think of novellas? What do you like and dislike about them?
