pondering length

[marycatelli]

One complication of my style of writing outlines is that I have only the vaguest idea how long the story will be once the outline is done.

But sometimes I can guess -- long enough to be hard to sell.  grump, grump, grumble. . .

There are some lengths for which there are just no markets:  too long for magazines and anthologies, too short for a full length book.  The Unpublishable Void, I call it.  

Oh, well, with the latest outline to seem this length, I might be able to work up more stories about the characters -- I have a few ideas -- and write a fix-up without managing to sell its parts.

Still -- GROUSE.

Comments

[crinklequirk.livejournal.com]

Adding in those stories which are over 1000 words, so not really flash fiction, yet less than 2 or 3 thousand, so are too short for many publications' "short" stories.

Yes, grump, grump, indeed.

[marycatelli]

there are some that take between 1000 and 2000. Not many.

then, there are some that take over 10,000 but under, say, 20,000. Not many there, either.

sigh

Still hard to sell, if not quite as nightmarish as, say, 30,000 words.

[scbutler.livejournal.com]

I have more than a few ideas that also fall into the unsellable void. It's so often a perfect length. One of the reasons I don't read many short stories is because they're generally too short for any kind of development.

[marycatelli]

And if you don't let the story dictate its own length it won't sell for that alone, most likely.

[scbutler.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

The annuals

[notr.livejournal.com]

like Hartwell's and Haber's always seem to have a wide range of lengths of stories, from miniatures to 70-pagers, almost all collected from periodicals and anthologies. Are the longer ones overrepresented there because they're specifically looking for variety? Or is the void you're talking about on the far side of 70 pages, where you're into "half a novel" territory?

Re: The annuals

[marycatelli]

70 pages is only about 17500 words. There's a fair gap between that and 60,000 words -- and even 60,000 words is hard to sell as a novel nowadays.

pages and pages

[notr.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I realized as I hit send that "pages" was pretty ambiguous--I meant "normal" book pages, not typewritten pages, so 30k is the top of the range that I'm thinking is well represented.

Re: pages and pages

[marycatelli]

Well, either way, first you have to get published to get in.

Not easy at those lengths.

I guess it makes sense

[notr.livejournal.com]

that the more difficult lengths to get published would be overrepresented in a "best of" anthology, since they've already gone through a harsh "best of" test in getting out there in the first of place.

Re: I guess it makes sense

[marycatelli]

They take up so much more of an anthology or a magazine that if the readers don't like it, they will be angrier. You can skip over a short-short if you don't like it, but if a third of something is a story you don't like. . . .

Yeah, the standards are higher, too.