Everyone's a Size Queen

Why I think novellas aren't as marketable as they should be and what you can (and should) do to change that, plus an interview with Kristin Osani about her upcoming novella.

Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash

Let’s talk novellas.

They sit between 17.5 thousand and 40 thousand words. For the non-writers in chat, that’s approximately 70 to 160 pages. Animal Farm and I Am Legend are both novellas.

If you tried to submit I Am Legend to an agent in 2024, though, your manuscript might not even make it to the slush pile. Agents are looking for 80k+ word manuscripts, especially in speculative fiction. 100k seems to be about the sweet spot with stretching to 120k being widely acceptable.

Then you’ve got those big-daddy-tomes that Brando-Sando and his contemporaries crank out (Way of Kings is 383k words).

And if you’re trying to marinate in the world-building of your favorite Mormon fantasy author, the more the better. Can’t blame you.

Could never be me, though.

I love a tight story. Something that doesn’t take forever and a day to finish (reading or writing, doesn’t matter).

I know it’s personal preference and I’ll never yuck someone’s yum of doorstoppers, but given my attention span and time constraints, I appreciate the length of novellas. They are Goldilocks-esque in their beauty.

Not too long, not too short. Just right for this fast-paced, capitalist hellscape we live in.

Fortunately for you size queens out there, traditional publishing does not agree with me (and my agent has kindly asked me to stop writing novellas, bless her).

The indie horror world is more accommodating, at least. At StokerCon this last year, I attended a panel on novellas in horror publishing and was glad to see the demand for them was increasing. Publishing novellas comes with its own hardships, of course (pricing, printing size, etc) but I think horror especially lends itself to the novella length and there seems to be a growing market.

That’s not to say other genres don’t have novellas. I think everyone can fondly remember how big a splash This is How You Lose the Time War by Amar El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone made several years back.

So, then, what is it about the novella that traditional publishers shy away from?

A lot of it comes down to profit margin. It costs a certain amount of money for a publisher to print a book and there is an overhead to cover before a profit is turned. The sale price needs to be balanced against the value a new reader places on that book. Having a reader question whether $15 for a 100-page book from someone they’ve never heard of is a better purchase than that same amount for a 300-page book is not something traditional publishers want to deal with.

This is precisely why you’ll see more indie publishers taking shots with novellas. Their overhead is lower. They can price a novella accordingly. There are fewer cooks in the kitchen, all asking for a slice of the pie. They can publish something they love with less worry over the implicit risk usually attached to debut authors. Their profit margins can be thinner.

Indie publishing is the secret way for us all to have the right bowl of literary porridge.

It’s still an uphill battle, though. Those of us who think it’s not about the book length but how you use your word count can do naught but buy more novellas. Request more novellas at libraries. Shout about our favorite novellas on social media.

Read my interview with Kristin Osani below about her upcoming novella, The Extravaganza Eternia.

Maybe we will continue to see a shift in publishing. Maybe in ten years the big five (or four now?) will be cranking out novellas left and right.

Quizás, quizás, quizás…

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Community Voices

Neon Hemlock is excited to crowdfund for a new trio of anthologies in 2024! These books will be sure to have something for everyone, be it the best work from last year's queer speculative fiction, a year's worth of Baffling Magazine, or a truly incredible tome of transfemme cyberpunk fiction.

The Kickstarter is live until July 15th and you can find the link here.

Note: This crowdfund is to secure funding for the entire series to facilitate printing costs and the other up-front fees that can be such a nightmare in indie publishing. As such, individual books will not be part of this crowdfund. If you're just looking to buy just one book, Neon Hemlock would be delighted if you ordered the title through your local indie bookstore later in the year. They will also have individual ebooks available at a later date.

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Interview

Kristin Osani is a queer fantasy writer who lives with her husband in northeastern Japan, where she works as a Japanese-to-English video game translator and manga editor when she’s not writing, working on nerdy cross-stitching, or cuddling her two cats. Her novella, The Extravaganza Eternia, is coming out soon from Ghost Orchid Press. I got a chance to talk about her upcoming book.

AP: Hey Kristin! Thanks for joining me today and congratulations on your upcoming novella! The Extravaganza Eternia is coming out on July 23rd. What can you tell my readers about your book?

K: It's a queer fantasy murder mystery set in a supernatural circus, the titular Extravaganza Eternia. Leathan, one of the bit performers, doesn't let herself get close to anyone because she's cursed to turn into a tumbleweed and be flung to the opposite ends of the earth whenever she forms a connection with someone—and the deeper the connection, the more it hurts when her curse rips it out of her heart.

But then the star of the circus is murdered, and the ringmaster tasks Leathan with faking friendships with the other troupers to find out which one of them is the killer.

It's got gore and glitter galore and is an unabashed love letter to Sailor Moon.

AP: “Gore and glitter galore” is so good! I’m curious about your creation process. How did The Extravaganza Eternia come into being? 

K: This novella came to me in bits and pieces that I smooshed together into a story-shaped creature that I then covered in gobs of makeup and frilly fabric.

First was Leathan’s name, which I woke up out of that state of nearly-but-not-quite-asleep to frantically scribble down so I wouldn't forget it. Then, I attended a virtual event put on by K. Tempest Bradford as part of the 2021 Clarion Write-a-Thon, where we did a writing exercise with pictures that inspired several main visual aesthetics. Around the same time, an agent who critiqued my YA fantasy mentioned off-hand she thought I’d be good at writing cozy mysteries. The setting was inspired by the Dead Moon Circus in Sailor Moon, an anime I’ve adored since I was five. Leathan’s curse was inspired by my own idle musings of likening myself to a tumbleweed when I did the math and realized I’ve yet to live in one place for longer than a handful of years my entire life.

It took me two years from starting the draft in the summer of 2021 to finishing it in the early fall of 2023 and sending it off to publishers and agents, and then a lightning-fast couple of months before Ghost Orchid Press snapped it up.

AP: It’s funny how the publishing world can be so slow and then so fast. What does a flow state look like for you? What can you tell us about your creative process?

K: My process is absolute chaos. 

I’ve taken to thinking of myself as a “puzzler” writer because of how my stories come together in pieces, except some of them are missing, and some of them seem like they fit, only for me to find out later upon closer inspection that, nope, those bits don’t actually quite align, and sometimes that means throwing them out entirely, or finding a different part of the puzzle where they actually fit, or getting scissors and cutting off bits and pieces to make them fit and then smoothing over the jagged edges with sandpaper. Oh, and not only do the images on the pieces themselves keep changing, the reference picture in my head that is the story in its perfect, ideal form keeps changing, too. Everything is in constant flux pretty much from the word go.

It means my process is also highly iterative, to the point that I don't have distinct draft numbers, because they all kind of blur and blend into each other. You know that meme of a horse drawing, where the rear is super photorealistic and lifelike, and then as you progress towards the head, it gets more and more sketchy and stick-figure-y? That's what my drafts look like: very detailed and almost final polish at the beginning, devolving into brackets and bullet point lists and questions to myself towards the end. With each pass I do, the details get filled in more and more until the picture is complete. And by that, I mean "as good as I can make it at this point in time," because there are always things I can find to tweak even after a story is out in the world.

I love the initial "daydreaming and scribbling down all sorts of notes to myself" phase. Drafting is like ripping out hair and pulling teeth and nails on a chalkboard. Revision is my favorite part of the whole thing because the heavy lifting of making shit up from whole cloth is done and I get to really dive into the nitty gritty and tinker and tweak and polish to my heart’s content. Revision is the only part of the process where I feel like I actually enter a flow state, when those puzzle pieces finally stop shifting around and settle into place and the whole image finally, FINALLY comes together with satisfying cohesion.

AP: It’s so wild how different everyone’s process can be and I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone describe their process as puzzling. How did you get into translating and what effect has that world had on your writing?

K: I kind of fell into translation as a career. Funny thing is, I translated Japanese folktales into English for my undergrad thesis, and my conclusion after all that was, "Eh, translation's not for me." Fast forward a few years to spring 2015, and my partner (who got into video game translation half a year or so prior) and I are at a game localization jam in Tokyo, where a bunch of folks got together for a day to translate a small indie mobile game, and I'm on the editing team and really enjoying it. At the same event just happens to be a representative from a well-established translation agency, who gives me her card and tells me that they don't hire freelance editors, but I should take their translation test anyway. So I do, even though I'm certain I'm going to fail it.

I pass.

My writing has been dramatically impacted by my work as a translator in two major ways you might not expect. The first was when I had the privilege of working on an unusually involved project in 2017-2018 which gave me so much creative fulfillment that I remembered I wanted to be in this much control all the time--that actually, I wanted to bring my own stories and creative visions to life--so I should probably buckle down and get serious about that whole dusty "traditionally published author" dream of mine I'd had since I was like 7 or 8. I was back and forth on business trips a lot for that project, and I spent all the downtime I had alone in hotels absorbing as much about writing craft and more importantly business as I could, through YouTube videos, books, and online articles. That's also when I started seriously drafting my YA fantasy, the first manuscript I ever queried.

The second was that I realized I owed a lot of my success as a freelance translator to my supportive community and colleagues, and if I was going to make it as a professional writer, I desperately needed a writing community, too. I'd only ever spoken very briefly to a friend of my partner's who was self-published, but I wasn't sure self-pub was the way I wanted to go, and I didn't know any traditionally published writers at all. That needed to change. I started by going to the Writer's Digest Conference in 2019, because I'd always wanted to go and also because NK Jemisin was the keynote speaker that year (she was incredible, it goes without saying). Then I went to an SCBWI Japan event in February 2020, where I met Clara Kumagai, who's become one of my dearest friends; then I volunteered for the virtual SFWA Nebulas Conference that summer and met, among others, CJ Lavigne, who's also become one of my dearest friends. (Both Clara and CJ have also become two of the people I always give my drafts to for critique, and I can't overstate how much their enthusiasm and insight has sustained me over the years.) Anyway, it just snowballed from there, especially once I started helping out with SFWA's weekly writing dates. But the point is that I've gotten to meet, and sometimes even have the fortune of befriending, some of my favorite authors through those (mostly virtual) events. Without those friendships, without that connection to the greater industry and community, I wouldn't be here.

AP: That’s such a good point. Having that community around us makes a lonely profession feel so much better. Tell me a little about your upcoming projects. What can we expect next from you? What are you working on currently?

K: Hopefully a sequel to The Extravaganza Eternia, if it does well enough! But at the moment I'm focusing on a dark fantasy novel about a woman who starts seeing monsters that were supposed to have been eradicated from her city decades ago and decides to capture one to convince her powerful partners that they're real and need to be stopped. A little bit of Final Fantasy 7 meets Arcane meets the Daevabad trilogy. I'm hoping to have that ready to yeet at my first readers by the end of the year, but we'll see... Deployed in the query trenches I've also got a YA fantasy about a girl who has to hunt down the thief that stole her words, and a middle-grade graphic novel script about cats and grief in a witchy cottage.

Whatever ends up coming next, it will be queer and absolutely lousy with quiet, heart-and-soul-destroying yearning. Just like me! *ba-dun-chhh*

AP: I always like asking people at the end of these: What are some of your favorite pieces of art or media that have been grabbing your attention over the last few months? 

Since the beginning of March my life has basically revolved around Baldur's Gate 3, and I wish I could say that was hyperbole. Oh my gods, this GAME. THIS GAME. I am trying to be chill about it, but it is just. So good. The story. The characters. The design. The soundtrack. The everything!! It's one of those rare things that I fell super hard for, super fast. And to think I'd initially written it off because I'd tried Baldur's Gate 1 in high school and bounced off it! Shout out to my friend Tina who convinced me that actually yes, it was right up my alley.

For my first run, I did this nerdy thing where I designed my character after my main POV character in the dark fantasy I'm working on, to try and get more into her voice and motivations and decision-making processes, and I think it helped? It certainly didn't hurt. I'll probably do the same for the other two/three POV characters.

I will play other games again. Eventually.

Probably.

AP: Ha, of course you will. I was glad to break the hold BG3 had on me. Where can people find out more about you and your work?

K: I'm on Instagram @kristin.osani, or folks can check out my not-updated-as-much-as-it-should-be website, kristinosani.com!

AP: Thanks for joining me today, Kristin. I’m looking forward to reading The Extravaganza Eternia and seeing you continue on your publishing journey! Also, we should play Betrayal again sometime soon…

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Final Thoughts

I’ve been up to my elbows in revisions and I’m not stoked it’s taking so long, but that’s just the anthem of my people, one I’ll sing until the heat death of the universe.

I’ll have some updates on short stories, these revisions, and more community voices coming soon. I’ll also write about an upcoming writing retreat I was just accepted to.

Until then…

Be well, stay safe, love each other.