How to make the transition to longer romance

After the success of The Little which was 30,000 words of submissive Victorian age play, I decided to try something even longer. It took some planning and a fair while to write but Little Faith was 45,000 words when finished and written from two alternating perspectives, that of the hero and the heroine. It's been on sale for 3 days now and is in the top ten in the USA and the UK Victorian erotica chart. Not only that but it's had 5 5 star reviews so far since release.

I'm pretty proud of this as I've never written anything this long before. I started out with 3,500 word short stories back in 2012 and have gradually built up to longer stories over time. The success of this one does encourage me to keep going with longer rather than shorter stories as they seem pretty popular. My advice to anyone making the switch from short to long fiction can be summed up like this:

Start out short, get to understand the basics of storytelling with short stories, cover design and blurb too if you're doing them yourself rather than hiring someone.

Gradually go longer as leaping from 5,000 to 50,000 is a big step to take in one go like going from a five minute walk to a marathon without any training in between.

Planning makes life so much easier. Get a synopsis and chapter by chapter plan together before you start and you won't end up with huge plotholes that require substantial rewrites later on.

I aimed for around 2,000 words per chapter spread over 20-25 chapters. In the end some of my later chapters were too short so were combined together to make the same length chapters ending with a 21 chapter book.

Pricing at 99c/99p as an introductory offer as new readers (in my opinion) are more likely to take a chance on an author they don't know if the price is low.

So far it's proved a worthwhile experiment and the success of Little Faith makes me think I should have been braver and made the transition a while ago but there's always the fear that a longer work might flop and write off the time you spent writing it.

Little Faith on Amazon