A continuous thread

 When I took the decision to indie publish my work I decided to write some completely new stories to put out there.  And I decided to focus on writing novellas.

There were several reasons for making that decision.  First, the novellas are in the science fiction genre, and there is a resurgence of interest in novellas there. Big-name authors such as Aliette de Bodard, Gareth L Powell, and Adrian Tchaikovsky have all recently published novellas to critical acclaim.  So I reckoned there'd be an appetite among SF readers for my novellas.

Which brings me to the second reason for opting for this shorter form. Novellas are generally somewhere between 17,500 and 40,000 words in length.  At least, they are for mainstream publication.  I opted to keep within that word range for my novellas.  Which meant that I could produce them relatively swiftly.

I wrote the first draft of the first novella during NaNoWriMo last November.  I never officially register for it, but we have a very lively local NaNo group which meets every week in November in person (Covid permitting).  Last year was the first time we'd got together for three years, and I used that NaNo incentive to help me write the first novella in that month.  The first draft ended up at 38,000 words.  After editing it's now reduced to 35,000 words.   That's a good length for a novella.

Now comes the second reason for writing novellas, and it's a marketing one.  I have been absorbing the wisdom of successful indie publishers like a sponge, and one of the key marketing tools is to have a series of books to promote.  This then allows you to do things like give away the first ebook in the series for free for a limited period, to drive discovery of your series.

But that works best when you have more than one book to sell, and many people think you're better off having at least three in a series before you start to do any serious marketing.  So that's what I plan to do.  In the series I plan to launch with there will eventually be five books.  They will all be standalone stories, but they will be driven by one continuous story thread running though all of them.

That thread is the search for a character who has disappeared.  She is in mortal danger. but might not even know that.  The threat is reinforced in each novella by the search for one of her sisters, who are also in danger.  The main characters hope that each sister they find will know where this missing character is.  They don't, of course, so the quest has to continue.

I wanted more than that long story arc to tie them together, though.  In the first novella my two main characters, Snap and Strike, bicker a lot.  So this is something I plan to carry through to each novella too.

One of my main characters is a starship sapient machine intelligence, and in the first story he suffered a code attack which nearly killed him.  I've used the fear of another attack on him as one more thread which will run through the series.

My goal is to have the novellas build on each other, each one revealing new pieces of the puzzle.  At the end it should feel like you've read an extended novel.  That's the theory anyway.  We'll have to see if it works for real.