Elder Races Novella FAQs and Cover Reveal Because novellas have become a significant part of the Elder Races, I thought readers might enjoy a few FAQs on the process and the technical stuff. One of the questions I get asked is why do I write the novellas? First, I have so many ideas, and they are fun to write. Also, under the terms of my current contract, the full length books are published by Berkley. Outside of that contract, I can only write novellas in the Elder Races series (or short stories). And finally, the novellas offer readers tidbits of the world while they have to wait between books. All of the novellas are written in such a way that readers can enjoy them on their own, but as they involve expanding on world building in the series and they also often have characters who might not get a full-length novel, I feel they are best enjoyed when you read all of the stories together. Samhain Publishing has published the first five novellas in the Elder Races: True Colors, Natural Evil, Devils Gate, Hunters Season and The Wicked. All of these stories are linked to the Elder Races universe, but the first four are especially linked by a mysterious Tarot deck. Those are called the Tarot novellas. After that I began to self-publish the novellas. So far Ive produced Dragos Takes a Holiday, Pia Saves the Day, and the short story Peanut Goes to School. Again, these stories are all in the Elder Races universe, but they are especially linked to each other. (And Ive had tremendous fun doing so!) The novellas might seem like a fast read, and in some ways they are. In reality, they are also a 1/3 of a full length novel. They take me a month to draft, and then several days (up to a week, perhaps) to edit. (The exception to this is the Peanut short story, which is 55 pages long. That story took me a couple of weeks to write.) After I write the novella, it goes to beta readers, then a professional copyeditor. I make changes and produce a final draft, and that goes to a proof reader. Essentially, the novella goes through the whole production process that a full length story goes through. During this time, I also contract with a professional digital artist, and a formatter, who produces all the ebooks and a POD for Createspace on Amazon. Keeping all these steps and costs in mind, the novellas are priced at $2.99. The print version on Createspace is something I do as a service to readers, as I dont really make money on them. I also dont have control over how the print version is priced. Amazon tells me how much the book will cost, and then I add a few pennies on top of that to recoup the costs of the cover artist and formatter. While theyre expensive, the main thing is they are available for readers who dont read ebooks and yet really wish to read the novellas. Im producing bundles of the stories as I go. This is to give readers as wide a choice as I possibly can. For example, some people might not want to read Peanuts story, or a story about a medusa (Devils Gate) - which is totally understandable. For those readers, they can buy the individual stories and skip the ones they dont want. Others want all of the stories, and for them, the bundles can make a lot of sense. The bundles have different names from the original stories. This is for metadata reasons and cataloging. The story bundles have to be listed in their own unique way and have their own ISBN numbers. To avoid reader confusion, the bundle blurbs state specifically which story is in each book and that it has been previously published before. I will be producing the Dragos, Pia and Peanut stories as a bundle. That bundle is entitled A DRAGONS FAMILY ALBUM. Were on target for that to be released in ebook, print and audio in October. In my last newsletter, I did an exclusive cover reveal for the bundle... Heres the bundle image for online booksellers, and also what the cover will look like for the print version. I love this cover so much! I hope this has been an interesting peek behind the scenes!
Posted on: Sun, 21 Sep 2014 16:13:51 +0000
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