Writing Forum

Personally, I find novellas a wonderful intermediary when going from short story and novelette writing (where I started as a writer) to novels. For all intents and purposes they are long short stories. Or a serial of short story type "chapters." Ironically until the last twenty, maybe thirty years, many "novels" were just above novella in size. Or at least my book shelves full of 250-350 page paperback novels would tell me (I bought most of them before 1990).

Atop that, the novel is pretty much a moving target these days. If you look at Brandon Sanderson's works that are 400k words, those are more like mini-series in one bound cover. Yet romance novels rarely pierce the 100k word threshold, but are the highest sold genre of the last... twenty years?

I know my patience for mega novels has diminished with age. I mostly read online serials for the last ten years. And while some of those have gone well past 150k words, most slip in at under 80k.

Just saying, that with how publication, amateur and pro, changes through the decades and novella sales have improved over the last five'ish years, I doubt we have seen the end of this poorly defined and often maligned category.