Damn Novellas

Yesterday, I purchased "Capital Crimes", a "collection" of two novellas by Jonathan and Faye Kellerman.

The husband and wife team are individually immensely successful crime novelists. I've not ready any of Faye's work, but very much enjoy Jonathan's "Andrew Delaware" novels. I very much enjoy the way he weaves his experience as a clinical psychologist into his novels. He's published in journals extensively on psychology, particularly child psychology, and his knowledge of the field shows in his novels.

Trivia: The Kellerman's are the only married couple in history to appear simultaneously on the New York Times Best Seller List.

Anyway, on to novella's. I'm glad the Kellerman's were able to come up with a market for theirs.

In case you don't know, novella's are strange beasties. Too long to be short stories, too short to be novels. There is debate on what constitutes a novella, but the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, for their Nebulus Award, classify novellas as 17,500 to 40,000 words.

There is the problem. I have written two novellas that I think are quite good. One's about 25,000 words and the other about 30,000 words.

From Wikipedia:
Stephen King, in his introduction to Different Seasons, an anthology of four of his novellas, has called the novella "an ill-defined and disreputable literary banana republic"[2]; King notes the difficulties of selling a novella in the commercial publishing world, since it does not fit the typical length requirements of either magazine or book publishers. Despite these problems, however, the novella's length provides unique advantages; in the introduction to a novella anthology titled Sailing to Byzantium, Robert Silverberg writes:
[The novella] is one of the richest and most rewarding of literary forms...it allows for more extended development of theme and character than does the short story, without making the elaborate structural demands of the full-length book. Thus it provides an intense, detailed exploration of its subject, providing to some degree both the concentrated focus of the short story and the broad scope of the novel. [3]
In his essay 'Briefly, the case for the novella,' Canadian author George Fetherling (who wrote the novella Tales of Two Cities) said that to reduce the novella to nothing more than a short novel is like "saying a pony is a baby horse." [4]

The novella is simply too long to be published in any of the short story magazines, who seem to limit fiction. For example, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine's guidelines say they accept fiction up to 12,000 words, but prefer much lower word limits.

But on the other hand, novels typically run 60,000-65,000 on the short end.

The poor old novella. It's a great form that is the best of brevity and detail. And there is no home for it.