Aside from today's captions, I also really wanted to ask for your thoughts on my next ebook. A while back I posted some captions called "As You Wish", which served as the opening portion of a story I'm writing about genies and bad wishes.
The issue I'm having is that I've finished the story finally, but as I read back through things (looking for spelling errors and editing as I go), I actually feel like the more natural stopping point is several scenes earlier than my ending.
And now I can't decide whether to keep the longer version, which is about 9-10,000 words long, or to end the story earlier and publish it as shorter ebook, a little over 6,000 words long. Which might be a bit short for $2.99, but due to Amazon's payment system, I really can't sell it for less without losing most of the royalties.
Any feedback, suggestions, or just your thoughts on the matter would be hugely appreciated. I still need to format the story and make a cover, so it'll be at least a few days before I can publish anyway.
Thanks in advance,
- B-Rex
Could you rework the section that comes after where the ideal ending would be, and make it fit the story better? Without having read anything it's hard for me to tell, but doing that might allow you to keep the story at a longer length while still writing to its strengths.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand you could just try to sell it at 6k and use that as a test case for what length of stories work well on amazon versus what is considered too short by the market.
I really loved As you Wish and was looking forward to read the whole story. Usually, I like it when a story has some 'afterglow'. A lot of storys end in the 'perfect moment' but then often I'm very curious what would have come afterwards. So in my opinion sell the long version. Maybe it's an option to have the long ending as an pretty long epilogue?
ReplyDeleteIn any case, I'm very happy that you've finished this story and I'll buy it as soon as it gets published.
If you're talking about just cutting off the rest of that story and leaving it unshared, I definitely don't want that. I agree with Welded that an overly long epilogue that still has fun details is perfectly welcome. Your worry may stem from the precedent you've set with most of your writing in general where you always end on a climatic punchline or "finishing blow". But if there's a bunch of final antics to share after the money-shot moment, I say go for it.
ReplyDeleteAs for this caption set, it's not my fetish but it's still definitely weird and fun. You came up with great ways for the conflict between those two to play out.