Novellas, pricing and value

I know we recently had a similar topic on serialisation, https://www.librarything.com/topic/332133#7504929 but the subject came up again on a reading thread, - pricing of novellas at the same point as novels.

https://www.librarything.com/topic/333613#7594063

"we should be able to judge for ourselves if we are paying over $10 per hour, for one of these short novellas, or a lot less per hour for a lot longer book. Especially if the book may never be read by me again if it isn't that great.

I know that sounds strange, and maybe cheap, and I assume the publishers are having these same sorts of conversations, but let's face it, after years of buying fantasy and scifi novels where 250 pages is considered short and 900 is epic, I'm used to paying a lot less than $10 per hour of reading. A lot less.

They are trying to change the value formula and I'm just not having it. That means I'm going to have to pay very close attention to page counts when I buy books online, or worse, put them on my wishlist, which is not something I've done much in the past. I don't really want to buy books by considering whether it is a good 'value' or not.

You'd think this would also be a consideration for awards - is a book being considered of the same 'value' as the others?"

My comment was that in principle I want to support authors earning as much of a living as they can from writing books I want to buy, but that I want to know (and clearly know up-front before buying) whether I'm buying an hour of entertainment or a few days.

But Value for Art is always going to be tricky, and unlike a painting with a book you really don't know how good (for you!) it's going to be even if you've read the author before. Not helped that I don't like the novella form much anyway as said on both the threads above, worst of both worlds too short for details too long for punch, failing inbetween.

Authors - what do you think? Can you write more novellas /year than novels? Can you live from them? do you want to? Is it publishers driving the prices? Do you see it as fair? What is a reasonable price for a book?

Eh, the value I get from a book often has little to do with the word count. Among recent reads, I could contrast The Tindalos Asset (longish novella length) to The Doom of Fallowhearth (full novel) to the favor of the former.

As I self-publish, my price points have more to do with what I think potential buyers will be willing to pay. For some titles, I want to keep prices down in the hopes of more impulse buying. For others, I boost them a little to help generate "perceived value." I've only published one book of fiction, and it was novella length. I take the lowest royalties on it of all my books.

Edited to add: Like the vast majority of contemporary authors, my book royalties are not my primary income.

I'm actually happiest setting prices based on wordcount. To me it feels the most "fair". My publisher tells me he's willing to use that as a starting point, but not as a rule.

But we sell my novella for the lowest price the store allows us. Because I'm primarily a novelist, my shorter works are looked at more as promotion that a direct source of income.

Personally I wouldn't pay 10$ for a ebook of a novella, I don't care who it is by. Unless it had some value added -- like, say, nifty illustrations?

All I write are short stories and novellas (so far). I would expect a reader to pay the same for a novel, as LS said: "I'm actually happiest setting prices based on wordcount. To me it feels the most "fair"

Yeah. It's fair.

>4 LeonStevens: "It's fair.

I know I just said as much myself, but I actually can see arguments for shorter works being worth more per word. With so few words, each word is punchier, for example. Or they could claim that they have to come up with many more story ideas than the novelist does, and that's one of the hardest parts of writing.

Poetry, for sure is worth more per word. I never mind when a poetry book is, by wordage, much much shorter than a novel. And I don't think I would complain about a short story collection being a little shorter than the average novel at the same price either. (If writing a short story is essentially the same thing as writing a novel only shorter, why do I have such a hard time with them?)

But I do successfully write novellas, and mostly the difference between those and novels is that the story is less complex. In other words, a novella is easier to write than the same number of words in a novel, because you've got fewer things to be keeping track of. (At least, that's how it is for me.)

>5 LShelby: "Poetry, for sure is worth more per word."

You are also paying to see into the poet's soul. That's gotta be worth an extra few bucks...

>6 LeonStevens:

So are we saying that we can't find the soul of a novelist in a novel?

I do wonder sometimes how much of myself leaks into my books.

Wouldn't an autobiography be worth inherently more than a biography in that case?

The novella is generally the best fit in "size of content" for the feature film. (Novels are too long, short stories too short.) So it may be the easiest format for many 21st-century fictioneers to compose.

>8 paradoxosalpha:
I agree that novellas are a good fit for feature films.

But I typically watch stories in video format that are 16+ hours long, rather than ~2.

The fact that I watch these shows proves that they still have an audience: nobody can afford to film 16+ hours of show with no market to recoup the investment from, even at typical tv production values rather than feature film values.

The question, I guess, is how much crossover of expectation are we going see across the linguistic divide? Will we get English writers specializing in e-novellas, and Chinese writers specializing in serialized web-novels?

>7 LShelby: " So are we saying that we can't find the soul of a novelist in a novel?

Not at all. I just think the motivation to write poetry can often be more personal and the subject matter is as well.

"I do wonder sometimes how much of myself leaks into my books."

You might want to get that checked out. 😮

"Wouldn't an autobiography be worth inherently more than a biography in that case?"

Yeah. Why not?

>10 LeonStevens: "Not at all. I just think the motivation to write poetry can often be more personal and the subject matter is as well."

Yeah, us genre writers tend not to be so much into the whole "self-expression" gig as you poets and those literary people. :)

Which is why I wonder about leakage. (I don't think my doctor can help with this one.) I'm not putting any part of myself out there on purpose, but I think it's impossible to write a 100K words on a non-technical subject without exposing something of yourself. Especially not if its 100K words of a story invented by myself and set in a world that I created myself. The whole thing probably screams "Me, me, me!" even if I'm not doing it on purpose.

I'm actually okay with the idea that autobiography is worth more per word than biography.

Not only do we have the argument of "soul" there is also the exclusivity issue. Anyone could theoretically write a biography of any particular person (well, unless they died before that person was born, but let's not go there), but only one person in the universe can write an valid autobiography of a particular person. That uniqueness has to be worth something.

...
And to wander off topic even more

I've actually been writing some stuff that looks an awful lot like poetry (if you squint hard), but it is more about skills than soul.

At least, I like to think I have skills. :)

I've been doing "singable translations" of some Chinese songs. I don't understand Chinese, so getting a song from one of my Chinese dramas stuck in my head can be quite frustrating, because I can't sing along.

So I look up other people's translations, and then rewrite them so that they match the music and rhyme and so on.

The motivation is very personal. I want to be able to enjoy singing the songs. But since about half of them are rather melancholy love songs, the subject matter couldn't be less so. I have not yet suffered any romantic tragedies in my life.

But it's a fun challenge. :)