When I joined Water Dragon Publishing, my first publication was The Third Time’s the Charm. It is a steampunky fantasy adventure with pirates and airships and a trans protagonist. An 8000-word novelette, it was published as part of the Dragon Gems program. Especially during the pandemic, Water Dragon had discovered that small books seemed to sell well. Now the rest of the world may be catching up.
In Short Books are Perfect for Our Distracted Age, Margaret Renkl describes finding short novels and novellas are rewarding because you can read them in a single sitting. Enough to immerse yourself in but not something you’ll need to return to day after day to finish.
When I wrote The Third Time’s the Charm, I imagined it as part of a series of connected stories: each with its own arc, but connected to an overarching story that linked them all. After writing the second, For the Favor of A Lady, I was able to persuade my publisher to let me serialize them as Revin’s Heart. Five more stories followed in which the protagonist goes from obscurity to the heart of a kingdom and shakes its foundations.
After, Rewriting the Rules came out, we created a collected edition that includes the seven novelettes plus three “side quests” that tell background stories about the characters, including Riva’s Escape, that describes the transition of the protagonist. In the stories he’s only ever described as an man with his transition simply an established fact. But I thought readers would be interested in learning more about his history.
It was a surprise to me to discover that the bundles of the individual stories was actually easier to sell than the collected edition. Another author was envious of how at conventions, the bundles seemed to fly off the table.
Soon, I’m hoping to see if lightning will strike twice. I’ve written another series of novelettes set in the same world, but twenty years earlier. A minor character in Revin’s Heart is Lady Cecelia, who is the curator of a botanical garden. She shows up just a couple of times. But I was interested in telling her background story.
In Lady Cecelia’s Journey, two young women, aristocrat and commoner, fall in love and struggle against societal norms against same-sex relationships and the difference in their social status. In order to live together openly, they flee their backward town to travel to the more cosmopolitan capital. I’m billing it as a sapphic romantasy road story. I’m hoping for it to be serialized as six novelettes, with a seventh omake novelette, Lady Cecelia’s Temptation, that will be part of collected edition.
