I’d like to talk about the novelette and why it should be making a return with the rise of eBooks.
According to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula awards for science fiction a novelette has a word count of between 7,500 and 17,499. It’s the ideal word length for a fast-paced thriller. The fact that it has more words than your average short story gives the writer the opportunity to show more character conflict, introduce more twists.
In the old Black Mask days a lot of writers worked within that format, like Erle Stanley Gardner and Dashiell Hammett. It catered perfectly to their spare style. This style was born because they were getting paid by the word and the editors tended to cut away as much unnecesary words as possible. The pulp writers wanted them to mess with their work as little as possible, so they wrote their stories in a very spare style.
For ebooks this style is great because there’s a lot of stuff out there at low prices. Readers want to experience as much fiction as they can. Novelettes give them everything a novel can, just in less time. It’s just what this generation, used to fast-paced movies and TV, needs. Longer novels might not hold the coming generation of readers’ attention, but the novelette has this chance.
So that’s why I wrote my novelette, The Alabaster-Skinned Mule. In an action-packed story Noah Milano, ex-mob fixer and son of LA’s biggest gangster, signs on to protect a beautiful girl that was used as a mule by Mexican druglords. It’s this girl that puts the friendship with his sidekick Tony Hawaii in danger.
Offering both pulp-style action and character conflicts this fast read is available for Kindle at the low price of 99 cents, http://www.amazon.com/Alabaster-Skinned-Mule-Milano-Novelette-ebook/dp/B005T0UC3G/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1
No comments:
Post a Comment