A change of size

 This week I've been reading a lot of interesting threads by authors on Twitter  about routes to publication. It's long been accepted that to become visible as an indie author you need multiple works on Amazon to stand a chance of people discovering you.  

There are authors who manage to publish two or three books a year and do this, but I don't think it's a route I can take.  I write pretty fast, but I'm writing science fiction and my books normally weigh in at between 97,000 and 118,000 words each.  To write that size of manuscript, and do the multiple edits which I think are necessary, takes around eight months.  I'm not going to get more than one book of that length out a year.

Short story collections by any author than an already established writer are notoriously difficult to sell, so that isn't a realistic route to market for me either.  So in the past, I'd discounted self publishing as a route to quick visibility for me and my work.  But this week I read a long thread from an author which made me think again about my choices.

This author suggested writing novellas as a way in.  She suggested that if you wrote a series of novellas you could get them out there fast, and if they're a series they would build on one another.  You could also do things like heavily discounting the first book in the series to hook people in.

When I started to think about this idea I got very excited about it.  In science fiction and fantasy circles novellas are currently undergoing a renaissance.  One of my favourite series is Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries.  Martha wrote four novellas about this character before writing a full length novel.

Likewise, another award winning author, Aliette de Bodard, has recently published a series of novellas, many of them standalones.  Granted they were both already mainstream published authors, but their novellas - and the awards they've won for them - have sparked new interest in stories of that length.

So I figure I could write three 40,000 word novellas in the time it takes me to write one novel.  That could potentially mean putting three books out a year.  I currently have ideas for one potential science fiction series and one fantasy series which I want to explore.

I'm only half-way through writing the novel I'm currently working on, and I'll finish that first.  I have a rule that everything gets finished, even if it gets immediately shelved.  I will most likely be going on a writing retreat in late October or early November, and that's perfect timing.  I'm planning on having the first draft of the novel finished by then, so I can dive into writing the first of my shiny new novellas on retreat.