Is Short the Future of Publishing?

Every day we hear new stories about the future of publishing. It's pretty common knowledge at this point that the big corporate publishers (often referred to as the "big 6″) are having a hard time. Small, independent publishers are folding. And everyone's wondering what the future will bring, and whether publishing as it is currently known will survive.

I honestly couldn't tell you. I think that publishers who are well established in specific niches have a better chance than generalists, but that's all just speculation. I'd rather discuss something that's a bit more specific.

Mainly, I'd like to discuss the length of popular fiction, particularly ebooks. I'm seeing a growing trend in shorter works of fiction being published as ebooks on a variety of platforms, and doing well. A lot of the bestsellers in genre fiction on Amazon are novellas or shorter novels (under 60,000 words or so), and almost all of them are indie published. Most traditional publishers have little to no interest in publishing these shorter works, as the profit margins are smaller and they don't see much of a market. But ebooks are changing that.

I've got my own theories on why shorter fiction, like novelettes and novellas, is going to lead the publishing industry in the coming years. First of all, people don't notice length with ebooks the way they do with print books. You don't look at an ebook sitting on your shelf (or the shelf of a bookstore) and wonder if you're paying too much for that size book.

Shorter books can be priced more competitively, because there aren't the fixed costs associated with printing. Design and layout costs are also reduced, and there are plenty of tools on the market for helping DIY'ers set up their own books.

Indies can make a better career out of shorter books than longer ones sometimes. As a general rule of thumb, writing, editing, and proofreading a shorter book is faster than a longer one. Of course, that's not always the case, but it can be. And the key to indie success seems to rely at least in part on publishing a large volume of work. So if you can write and polish three novellas in the time it takes you to write and polish one longer novel, you can publish more frequently. If someone buys one of your books and likes it, they're more likely to buy your other books.

I've been working on a series of steampunk novellas since November. I'm at the final polishing stage for two of the novellas (one is coming in at 18k, but I have some descriptions to add which should bump it up over 20k, and the other is 26k), and I have plans for at least five more books. All of these are likely to be novellas, probably in the 20-40k word range. So I've been doing a lot of research on novellas, their success rates, and appropriate pricing (and by "appropriate" I mean the amount of money people will happily pay for a novella from a new author). That research included an informal poll of what people would pay for a steampunk novella from a new author. I was a bit surprised by the results.

Now, there weren't a huge number of votes (9). And other than the one vote for $.99, the votes were evenly split between $2.99 and $4.99. I had assumed that the votes would be more evenly split between $.99 and $2.99, maybe even with a preference for $.99. Based on the data I've collected, I'm going to go with $2.99 for the novellas. At some point, once more than a couple are out, I may lower the price of the first one so that people can try with lower risk.

My advice to authors, especially indie authors, is to stop worrying so much about length. There's a growing market for shorter novellas, and we're no longer reliant on finding a publisher to get readers or make money with our work. If you have a story that's only 25k words and you can't find a market for it among traditional publishers, why not put it out as an ebook? If you've been putting off writing a certain story because you felt like it was going to fall into an "unsellable" length, why not write it anyway and put it out on Kindle?