32 tales or one Novel?
Posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2015 at 13:41
One of my new beta readers feels that “Ironmaster & Other Tales” is too big and intimidating for most Kindle readers (who like a book they can read in a couple of sittings). I’ve looked at the word count of what I’ve edited so far (and the bits I haven’t yet) and it’s around 230,000 (or 230k) words (or so and still falling as I edit although that is a Word Wordcount) but still a novel starts at 40k words and often is less than 100k these days – this seems massive – that said while Ironmaster is only a little bigger than any one “Lord of the Rings” volume it is about half the length of the trilogy as a whole and smaller than most volumes of the “River of Time” series – at least according to this.
Ironmaster may be too big even for a Steampunk epic….
It has been suggested that I release each chapter (or maybe a few bundled together) as individual books on Amazon as well as the huge book (at what would work out as a discounted price…).
Realising each Tale separately does have some merit, but brings up problems…
I’m not sure, the 30 odd stories/novelettes/and novellas all weave one epic tale and it would be tricky to separate them in anyway that didn’t spoil the experience… Also what would I call the individual books (if they aren’t the individual stories which are already named and have black and white covers prepared) and the Series as a whole?
Most kindle readers read a lot more short kindle books than large ones and I agree that I could be excluding a lot of potential revenue and exposure by not publishing them separately.
Release them individually on Kindle select and briefly have a give away, getting each book in turn into the top-sellers and potentially dominate the Steampunk/Fantasy/Sci-fi charts for a while could be great recognition and may push latecomers into buying the “box set” later – alternately I might just annoy a lot of people very quickly by releasing varying length stories with a similar price tag, and I’m sure infamy is not the same as famous…
Any thoughts from anyone else – Beta reader or fellow author or just reader, what do you expect for 99 cents? A novella? A short story? Or a couple of shorts and a novella? And what is a reasonable price for 230,000 words of interconnected Novellas, Novelettes and shorts?
I will still have the Omnibus Paperback and a kindle ebook Omnibus that is priced based on Lulu.com’s price restrictions – although if I go the Kindle select route that will come some time later as Amazon hate an Indie Author to compete with themselves and demand 90 days of exclusivity.
Well, any thoughts?