A novella is under 40,000 words; a novel is 40,000 words or more. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that Kenneth Oppel’s Dead Water Zone is 38,000 or so. Not that it matters. I mean, I don’t get a dollar off novellas. When I blogged Connie Willis’ Inside Job, I mentioned that “if it were in an anthology, it would probably be my favorite thing in it, but by itself it seems terribly light.” This was meant to be a comment on this whole idea of publishing a novella as a separate volume, an idea that is perfectly reasonable, but which I have difficulty accepting. Of course, even now one of the small handful of mentions of my nom de net that Your Humble Blogger did not seed by hand is a pull quote in a paragraph of reviews of Inside Job: Vardibidian: “terribly light”. Not meaning me, meaning the book. So I want to make it clear that (a) it really is very reasonable for a publisher to release a 35,000 word story or even a 20,000 word story as a stand-alone item, if they feel that there is a market for that particular item, even if YHB is not a part of that market, usually, and (2) my dissatisfaction with the experience of reading a book, meaning a single volume that is comprised of one novella, is purely a matter of taste and habit, and I neither make any attempt to justify it nor do I think that I’ve used comprised correctly. Can you use comprise with a single thing like that? Or do you need multiple subobjects to comprise something?
What I’m saying is, the judges give points for taste, originality and presentation, but not for the size of the portions. On the other hand, my instinct is to expect a big helping. I’m that way, I guess.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.